My Emoji Story
Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?
I used my iPhone keyboard to write my Emoji story because I am most used to using that medium. On my iPhone, I was able to search for the different kinds of emojis, which helped write the emoji story. However, rather than typing complete sentences, I had to type in keywords to represent the sentence’s meaning. A challenge I encountered was not being able to use verbs. I had to find the appropriate noun to describe the actions of the movie. For example, I searched for the keywords ‘knife’ and ‘blood’ to demonstrate killing. Another challenge was having to piece together images to represent a word. For example, I wanted to write ‘witch’; however, all the available emojis were of cute witches while I needed an image of an evil witch. So I used two images to represent that: an emoji of the devil and an emoji of the cute witch.
Treating texts pictorially as David Carson and Johanna Drucker did in the 90s is not a new concept. People have been so used to seeing images and texts working together to convey an idea that words no longer seem to carry conviction without the appearance of a picture alongside them (Bolter, 2001). Although the use of images for communication is nothing new, writing a story using Emojis only is a different concept that presents very different challenges. First of all, the Emojis in this task are meant to replace words, not to compliment them. Secondly, the Emojis are not customized images, which means they cannot be a “natural” representation. Unlike Egyptian writing, which are small stylized images that can blend smoothly with illustrative images (Weitzmann, 1970, pp. 57-69), I think Emojis only supplement the meaning of a word or sentence, giving it an emphasized emotion.
Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?
I started the story with the title because it felt like the most logical thing to do. In addition, it helped my mind to work through the story from beginning to end.
Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?
I chose a movie that I had just finished watching with my daughter, so the details of the movie were still fresh in my mind. However, I don’t think this story was easy to visualize because there were many words I could not find a good Emoji to represent. I found it especially difficult to describe abstract concepts such as “someone telling a story about what witches look like,” “the witch trapped the little girl in a painting,” and “the potion transformed the boy into a mouse.”
Reference:
Chapter 4. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110
