The biggest challenge I faced in researching for my EE was the lack of relevant research. I knew this would be a challenge before I started, since memes are such a niche topic and aren’t seen as a “serious” aspect of politics as opposed to media coverage. Because of the way memes are viewed, there weren’t a lot of academic papers to give me insightful information, so I relied on more speculative information from my own analysis and from news articles featuring memes of candidates. I feel like it would have been much more beneficial for me to write an EE on the 2020 or 2024 elections, and how memes influenced them, since the 2016 election was one of the earliest social media-fueled elections, but that hasn’t happened yet.
