Abstract

This paper connects memetics – the cultural study of ideas expressed across a plurality of artifacts – to perspectives on documentation. We theorize how memetics and documents share a common interest in accounting for cultural organization.

We develop a conceptual history of memes in parallel with document theory to synthesize a documentalist interpretation of memetics.

We outline how memes might be viewed or take on the status of a document. Doing so advances a novel approach to representing documents and the cultural ideas they carry, as memes.

We place memetics within the library and information science domain, alongside documentation. The conceptually rich history of memes invites an interrogation of the ways memes might extend document theory. Yet, minimal prior contributions connect memes and documentation, without asserting the documentality of memetic memory. This contribution leverages insights from memetics to analyze the extant limitations of documentation and provide a speculative ontology of cultural transmission.