Link Week 6 – Emoji story

Daniella Bababuk:  https://blogs.ubc.ca/dbalabuk540/2020/06/19/task-6-an-emoji-story/

I chose Daniella’s emoji post to link to my own.  At first I thought our approaches to the assignment were similar and upon further reflection realized they were somewhat different.

Daniella uses the same presentation architecture as me – WordPress (the basic format).  It is usable, but not as sophisticated and “pretty” as some other blogs.  (Although as I have learned, pretty does not always result in a more useable (readable) format – so if making the word easy to communicate, WordPress does it all.

To attempt to actually create an emoji story, Daniella chose a book that she was reading while I chose a television show that I was watching, but one which I also thought might more easily translate into an emoji story.  Daniella’s attempt to translate her book (I now know it was Aftermath by Rachel Cusk) was a challenging one.  She identified in her post that she relied more upon the expression of ideas than syllables when trying to convey the book title in her emoji story.  Daniella also advised that while she did start with the title, she divided that word into two – in an attempt to try to translate same.

In my emoji story I took a slightly different approach.  I used a very linear thought-process and used symbols to try to describe the plot – which I thought were clues to the title of the television show (Homeland).

I used the emoji keyboard made available in this assignment, which I found very limiting.  Had I more experience or another more expansive keyboard I thought I might have been able to do a better job trying to convey hints to the name of my chose television show.

One interesting note – in her blog, Daniella states that she things her book title can be described by emojis – she gave a few hints and I tried a few ideas but surmised that I had not likely figure it out.  In a comment, I asked Daniella if she could tell me the name of the book – her answer was different – that she thinks (I think in hindsight) that she did not do the assignment correctly and didn’t think I would be able to guess the book name (I was not)).

Symbols are difficult.  Maybe it is all in the eye of the author.  That the person telling the story with the symbol may think that others can decode same, but when given an almost infinite range of options, it is much more difficult than that.

I think Daniella and I had similar experiences with attempting to use an emoji story to convey information.  That is it difficult, limited by the emojis available and unclear if any information will be conveyed to an end user.