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Our purpose is to reconnect memetics to information, a persistent and unclear association. Information can contribute across a span of memetic research. Its obscurity restricts conversations about “information flow,” the connections between “form” and “content,” as well as many other topics. As information is involved in cultural activity, its clarification could focus memetic theories and applications.

Our design captures theoretical nuance in memetics by considering a long standing conceptual issue in memetics: information. A systematic review of memetics is provided by making use of the term information across literature. We additionally provide a citation analysis and close readings of what “information” means within the corpus.

Our initial corpus is narrowed to 128 pivotal memetic publications. From these publications, we provide a citation analysis of memetic studies. Theoretical directions of memetics in the informational context are outlined and developed. We outline two main discussion spaces, survey theoretical interests and describe where and when information is important to memetic discussion. We also find that there are continuities in goals which connect Dawkins’s meme with internet meme studies.

To our knowledge, this is the broadest, most inclusive review of memetics conducted, making use of a unique approach to studying information-oriented discourse across a corpus. In doing so, we provide information researchers areas in which they might contribute theoretical clarity in diverse memetic approaches. Additionally, we borrow the notion of “conceptual troublemakers” to contribute a corpus collection strategy which might be valuable for future literature reviews with conceptual difficulties arising from interdisciplinary study.

The purpose of this paper is to promote social network analysis (SNA) methodology within the humanitarian research community, surveying its current state of the art and demonstrating its utility in analyzing humanitarian operations.

A comprehensive survey of the related literature motivates a proposed agenda for interested researchers. Analysis of two humanitarian networks in Afghanistan demonstrates the use and utility of SNA, based on secondary data. In the second case study, the use of random graphs to detect network motifs is demonstrated using Monte Carlo simulation to create the benchmark null sets.

SNA is an adaptable and highly useful methodology in humanitarian research, quantifying patterns of community structure and collaboration among humanitarian organizations. Network motifs suggesting distinct affinity between particular agencies within humanitarian clusters are observed.

The authors summarize common challenges of using SNA in humanitarian research and discuss ways to alleviate them.

Practitioners can use SNA as readily as researchers, to visualize existing networks, identify areas of concern and better communicate observations.

By making SNA more accessible to a humanitarian research audience, the authors hope its ability to capture complex, dynamic relationships will advance understanding of effective humanitarian relief systems.

To the best of knowledge, it is the first study to conduct a systematic analysis of the application of SNA in empirical humanitarian research and outline a concrete SNA-based research agenda. This is also a currently rare instance of a humanitarian study using random graphs to assess observed SNA measures.