In this exercise, I found that it was easier to think of which emojis to use when I imagined myself sitting around a campfire, drawing images in the dirt on the ground with a stick, trying to communicate to someone who doesn’t speak my language. For the work’s title, I chose to revert to phonetics, mostly because the specific emojis didn’t seem to exist, but also because, in this case, the title is relatively unimportant (it’s essentially a proper name). I started with the title because it seemed to be the most natural place to start.
As I reflected on the motifs and main themes of the work, I found myself searching through the emoji list for depictions of concepts that capture the idea, being conscious of how the emojis could be interpreted in other ways. In this sense, it was an exercise in reverse ekphrasis because I was attempting to convey prose in logogrammic or semiotic form. What I found interesting, is that the emojis are exquisite in their ability to convey emotion, parallel to the expression “a picture is worth a thousand words”, but are very much reduced to basic vocabulary for most things beyond the common emotions of the human experience. For example, if we are describing the road sign “slippery when wet”, the picture writing of a vehicle off-balance with curvy lines that presumably depict watery skid marks, is able to effectively communicate a potential event to those without a common language (Bolter, 2001), but it is of limited portability in other contexts or as an element of iconography in describing anything else.
The other, somewhat unrelated, remark I had about this exercise, was the realization of the futility in providing an accurate page location for reference material (!). As we digitize our text and begin to accommodate alternate visual representations (whether prose or imagery), we find, as Ted Nelson pointed out in his exploration and development of Xanalogical Structure, that “page location” is something that is tied to the linear and rigid structure of a “…rectangle of text surrounded by white space…” in a book (Bolter, 2001; Nelson, 1999). Digitization affords the reader the ability to increase font-size to better accommodate accessibility concerns, rendering the sum of the pages in a book somewhat arbitrary. Similarly, in iBooks, readers have the ability to minimize embedded images to “thumbnails” in the margin, thereby changing the length of the document if we are mostly considering length to be the amount of prose in a work. If we consider the purpose of referencing others’ work, we may need to explore alternate ways to pinpoint source material when “page numbers” in electronic media, are no longer authoritative.
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Nelson, T. (1999). Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning and deep re-use Links to an external site.. ACM Computing Surveys, 31(4).