Period & Archival Materials
- Dancing Baby original project/about pages. Archived materials describing the 1996 3D animation demo and how the file was shared across early websites and email chains.
- “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” Flash music video. Originally hosted on Newgrounds and now preserved on the Internet Archive. Used to discuss how the meme turned from a simple mistranslated line into a full multimedia remix.
Scholarly & Analytical Sources
- Shifman, Limor. “Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 18, no. 3, 2013. Used for the definition of internet memes and for understanding how memes work as groups of related items rather than single images.
- Miltner, Kate M. “Internet Memes.” In The Sage Handbook of Social Media, 2016. This chapter provides a broad overview of meme research and helped frame memes as important communication tools rather than just throwaway jokes.
- Cannizzaro, Sara. “Internet Memes as Internet Signs: A Semiotic View of Digital Culture.” Sign Systems Studies, 2016. Offers a semiotic perspective on how memes carry meaning as signs that get reinterpreted as they spread.
Contemporary Commentary & Histories
- “All your base are belong to us.” Internetting – A User’s Guide, The Guardian. Explains the history of the phrase and how it sparked a photoshopping craze, helping to situate the meme in wider web culture.
- DancingBaby.io and other retrospective articles on the Dancing Baby. These pieces describe how the baby moved from technical demo to pop-culture symbol and reflect on its status as one of the first widely recognized internet memes.
- Overview articles and reviews of Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture. Used to connect early 1990s examples to later platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok.
Why These Sources Matter
Together, these sources helped me do more than just retell meme origin stories. The scholarly work gave me language for thinking about memes as cultural units that depend on repetition and variation. The period artifacts showed what early meme circulation actually looked like, from email forwards to Flash animations. Finally, the contemporary commentary connected these 1990s phenomena to the much larger, faster meme ecosystem we see on platforms like TikTok today.