Whatever ultramodernity places under the dominion of signs postmodernity subverts with virus… no longer what does it mean? but how does it spread?
What is a meme?
Examples of memetic inquiry
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Why study memetics?
The datasets
| Dataset | Scale | What it is | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| US Congress tweets | 5.1M tweets | 5,095,245 tweets from members of the US Congress and executive branch, 1999–2026. Each row: tweet id, author handle and name, party, chamber or role, state, timestamp, full tweet text, and a topic label where available. | aws s3 cp --no-sign-request s3://calcifer-hot/hopkins-hackathon-2026/congress-tweets-unified.parquet . |
| Twitter firehose | 395M tweets | 395M tweets from across X (all languages) posted in the trailing month. Each row: tweet id, author id, text, timestamp, language, reply / quote / conversation ids, and like, reply, retweet, quote, view and bookmark counts — with repeat snapshots per tweet, so engagement is a time series. | aws s3 cp --recursive --no-sign-request s3://calcifer-hot/hopkins-hackathon-2026/twitter-firehose-last-month/ ./twitter-firehose/ |
| Parkour Instagram Niche | 451k posts 10.8M observations |
451,301 Instagram posts from ~14,900 accounts in the parkour / freerunning niche: captions, media URLs, hashtags, and like / comment / view / share counts, with 10.8M timestamped engagement snapshots and a 595,730-edge account-to-account graph. | aws s3 cp --recursive --no-sign-request s3://calcifer-hot/hopkins-hackathon-2026/parkour-instagram-niche/ ./parkour/ |
| TikTok videos | 4.5B videos | 4.5 billion TikTok videos, one row each. Per video: caption, the sound used (music_id, a join key for tracking a sound across videos), play / like / comment / share / save counts, duration, country, language and post time. Sharded into 27 Parquet files of ~10 GiB — the split is a hash of the creator ID, so any single shard is an unbiased sample of roughly 167 million videos. Start with one. | One shard · ~10 GiB · start hereaws s3 cp --no-sign-request s3://calcifer-hot/tiktok/tiktok-videos-4b/videos-00.parquet .All 27 shards · 270 GiBaws s3 cp --recursive --no-sign-request s3://calcifer-hot/tiktok/tiktok-videos-4b/ ./tiktok/ |
Judging Criteria
Vibes
Judging is purely vibes based. $1,000 in cash to the team that articulates the most interesting memetics phenomenon. Use these datasets or bring your own; anything you can pitch as memetics is fair game.
Happy Hacking!
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