MemeTracker: News Cycle Phrase Cluster Network Analyzed
A Web (news sites and blogs, Aug 2008–Apr 2009) dataset of 71,568 phrase clusters, 310,457 unique phrase nodes, 238,889 directed root→variant edges, 71,568 phrases in text corpus, collected by Leskovec et al. via web crawl of 1.5M articles/day, August 2008 to April 2009, distributed by SNAP. Each record contains phrase cluster graph where nodes are natural language phrases extracted from news articles and blogs; directed edges from root phrase to variant phrases within each cluster; edge weight = variant phrase frequency; covers the 2008 US election, financial crisis, and other major news events. The dataset is notable for its foundational information diffusion dataset capturing how phrases mutate and propagate across mainstream media and blogs; the cluster graph encodes phrase similarity and co-occurrence structure, enabling study of linguistic variation in news cycles. Intended for research into information diffusion modeling, meme propagation analysis, phrase clustering, linguistic variation in news media, temporal network analysis, and graph-based NLP research.