The funniest data package in the ARP Data Repository is also one of its most popular.
The research material collected with the lead of Katalin Vargha (ELTE Institute of Ethnology - Research Centre for the Humanities) and the help of ARP Ambassador Anna Szakál (ELTE HTK NTI) as part of the Global and local elements in contemporary folklore in Hungary and Estonia project was placed in the ARP Data Repository as part of the 2023 ARP Ambassador Program.
The background to the research was the creation of a large-scale international database designed to analyze humor related to the COVID-19 pandemic, involving researchers from 30 countries. The collection of jokes, memes, and other humorous content related to the pandemic was first started in March 2020 by a sociologist and humor researcher from Leuven. The aim of the research was to determine the extent to which humorous reactions to the global pandemic situation were similar or different by country. The database currently contains 12,000 entries.
The Hungarian meme collection, consisting of 344 items in jpg, png, and pdf formats, is available as a separate data package in the ARP Data Repository, and the images can be viewed individually on the interface without downloading. The data package is one of the most popular, with more than 13,000 downloads by December 2025, becoming the most individually downloaded research data package.
The Hungarian team worked closely with researchers from the Department of Folkclorics in the Estonian Literary Museum. As a result of this collaboration, with the support of ARP Ambassador Katalin Vargha, a second set of 171 memes containing Hungarian, Estonian, and Belarusian memes was added to the ARP Repository in November 2025. The researchers compiled the memes from the three original corpora for a comparative study, with the aim of collecting examples in which the keyword wordplay appeared. The following study, based on the selection and analysis of this data, was published in international cooperation:
- Fiadotava, Anastasiya – Vargha, Katalin – Voolaid, Piret (2025): Using wordplay to create humor in Estonian, Hungarian and Belarusian COVID-19 memes. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica (in press)
The Hungarian data package is also a regular feature in the ARP Roadshow, a series of events promoting ARP services. After presenting and testing ARP's services at the event series, participants are given a search task to select their favorite meme from the Hungarian Covid jokes and memes research data.
The research data is available:
- Hungarian Covid jokes and memes
- Wordplay in Estonian, Hungarian and Belarusian COVID-19 memes and jokes
Image source: https://hdl.handle.net/21.15109/CONCORDA/WEF6GB/ANCCGY and https://hdl.handle.net/21.15109/CONCORDA/WEF6GB/YUFCAH