Creating an emoji summary of my media was a challenge, for a number of reasons. I will be impressed if anyone can get it, not because the title is obscure by any means, but because my emoji translation requires some creative interpretation.

In crafting this emoji translation, I initially attempted to rely purely on words. I quickly encountered the limitations of the emoji dictionary, which despite being comprised of 3770 emojis (https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-counts.html), still lacked direct word representations for my media’s title. The extent of the emoji dictionary caused me to reflect on Gnanadeskian’s (2008) discussion of the Cameroonian King Njoya’s creation of a writing system, where the King worked to create a logographical symbol system. He reached 465 symbols before shifting the system into syllabary, due to the inherent limitations of the logogram.

Emojis could be seen as a form of logogram. Each emoji represents an object, idea, or emotion which can be interpreted differently depending on the context of their usage. There are many more emoji’s than symbols in King Njoya’s script, yet even the simple words of my media’s title were difficult to convey. This struggle emphasizes why the King’s script would have needed to integrate syllabic system principles – the undertaking required to symbolically represent all words is unfeasible.

Thus, I shifted my approach from seeking direct word representation to instead representing broader ideas. Emojis rely heavily on context, and I found that grouping them was an effective way to convey meaning that would not be possible via individual emojis, or emojis placed directly one after the other.

I chose to start with the title, under the assumption it was going to be easy. Unfortunately, there was no emoji that met my requirements!

I chose the work not because I thought it would be easy to visualize, but because I thought it would be the most interesting. Its a complex summary to convey via emoji, but I’m hoping some of you will be able to unravel it!

A final observation on this task – I originally typed my emojis directly into the WordPress editor. Upon publishing, all my emojis were transformed to question marks, causing me to lose my emoji story. Despite fiddling with fonts and WordPress themes, I was unable to get my emojis to display correctly and had to settle for a screenshot.

The closest answer I could find was that the WordPress posts were being saved as the incorrect Unicode encoding, but I can’t tell for sure. And this indicates an issue for emojis, though their code and general design is universally described, their actual representation differs widely between platforms. For example, this site shows all the different designs of the same emoji. Are these differences vast enough to cause misinterpretations and contextual ambiguity? It seems certainly possible.

A writing system which is represented differently depending on the brand of the platform it is being consumed on is likely not a very effective or reliable means of communication!

References