Reflection

I started this synopsis with the title of the work, as the title contains a familiar name that will recur throughout the synopsis–if I couldn’t figure out the title, the rest of the process was going to be very difficult. Some word translations were used, but more often whole ideas were easier to convey with the emojis. The set of emojis that exists for my platform have very few one-to-new translations for the words I needed.  I tried to put one concept per line, only, and the synopsis is in chronological order for the work.  I did not chose the work for ease of translation, I choose the last work I saw (that may be a hint).

A major challenge for me was that I wrote the emojis in this UBC blog first, but when I hit [publish], the emojis on the draft became this:

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????????????   ????‍♀️   ????‍????   ????????????  ????????????  ????️????

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????  ⏎ ???????? → ????  ←→ ????  ???? ???? ????  ????  ????‍♂️????

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It seems that the version of WordPress we are using on UBC Blogs only supports a very few emoji. I was doubly-disappointed in that I had not thought to save the story prior to publishing, so I had to start over; using a word processor, printing as a PDF, and then clipping the image from the PDF to insert into this page.

It will be interesting to see if others can make meaning of my story, as it is such an idea-based translation and what meaning the reader makes of the emojis can be very different for each reader and certainly different than the author. Of course, I believe the use of emoji in this context is not really how emojis were conceived to be–emoji having evolved from emoticons, and emoticons serving the purpose to convey an emotion in am electronic message. The primary affordance of emojis are to convey emotional states of the author, but in this exercise we have pushed the emoji perhaps past its useful affordances in trying to convey facts and events in addition to emotion.