SUCHO Meme Wall

The Meme Wall is a project by the Saving Ukrainian Digital Heritage Online (SUCHO) initiative, an international volunteer initiative to preserve Ukrainian cultural heritage by archiving websites of Ukrainian cultural institutions and prevent data loss resulting from Russia’s war on Ukraine. For more about SUCHO, visit sucho.org.

Ukrainian war memes are an important born-digital element of contemporary culture. They are disseminated mainly through social media and transmit very powerful war-related messages in a playful manner. Because memes are strongly rooted in current events and ideas, their life span is very short and if not preserved, they will be lost. To preserve this cultural phenomenon SUCHO has begun building an archival collection of visual internet memes related to the Russo-Ukrainian war. The collecting is carried out by harvesting social media accounts dedicated to memes and by manual submission of individual memes via a public Google form. Each meme is described using a complex metadata structure. The collection can be previewed as an interactive “SUCHO Meme Wall”, where memes can be filtered or searched by content, language and template as well as by the names of individuals and countries mentioned.

• A CSV file comprising the entire published dataset is available.
• An RSS feed is available and is updated daily with new memes.
• An bot on the Fediverse posts a new random meme every two hours from a Mastodon account @[email protected].

This site is built directly from curated submissions to the Google Form. At build-time, the contents of the sheet is fetched and parsed, and the source images are downloaded from the Google Drive folder. The images are then processed to create the versions in multiple sizes/formats required to create the site. Additional material to complete the various glossaries is fetched, parsed, and incorporated into the site from a number of minimally structured Google Docs

The front-end site itself is created in HTML, CSS, vanilla Javascript, and a little Svelte using the Astro web framework. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages and the source is available on GitHub.