memetrackerBetween the recent economic collapse, the presidential election, and the many celebrity deaths, the media has been cranking out one-liners and soundbites quicker than we can process them.  MemeTracker, from researchers at Stanford and Cornell, visualizes popular memes over a three-month period.  Containing such classics as “lipstick on a pig” (Barack Obama on Sarah Palin) and ” I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s”, (John McCain, on his POW experience) it’s an interesting visualization showing how the phrases evolve and keep returning cyclically.

The researchers have published a paper describing the algorithms used to catalog, group, and analyze the 90 million articles gathered for the project.  The paper is available here.

MemeTracker: Top phrases.