Tag: emojis

LINK 2 – THE ARCHITECTURE OF AN EMOJI STORY

In week six, we were tasked with exploring the ‘breakout of the visual’. Gunther Kress, the Australian semiotician, laid our foundation by suggesting that visual elements are more than simple decorative pieces but rather true modes of representation and meaning that influence symbolic messaging (Kress, 2005). So much so, that these visually discernible features could define what we understand as a type of new contemporary literacy.

What then do we make of those little emotion icons we know as emojis? What (grammatical? written?) conventions are we to use if we were to create a narrative using only emojis? Jay David Bolter, in his book The Breakout of the Visual asserts that picture writing simply lacks narrative power; that a visual plainly means too much rather than too little (Bolter, 2001). As a result, it can become increasingly difficult to write a narrative using visuals alone – it’s easy to convolute the communication of character relationships and development, the sequencing of plot points, the passage of time, or the overall narrative flow.

Consequently, it proved interesting to peruse my colleagues’ emoji stories and analyze the way in which they decided to construct the narrative form. Ultimately, I felt that Judy Tai’s transcription of Ratatouille held a multitude of similarities with respect to the architecture of an emoji story in comparison to my arrangement of A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and Vision for the Future. While some participants chose the classic horizontal familiarity that comes from reading books, many others like Judy and myself, chose a vertical approach to projecting some approximation of narrative continuity. Among other blog posts, the most frequently mentioned factor was the difficulty in transcribing singular words into emojis; rather, authors needed to conceptualize a group of words or meanings and represent it with a chosen emoji image. Oftentimes, even this strategy proved difficult and some people had to simply revert to searching to images that offered readers expansive interpretations.

Carlo’s story on the left, Judy’s story on the right

The first and perhaps most obvious link, was both Judy and I took a vertical arrangement approach to conveying the central notions of our stories. It seems both Judy and I instinctively appealed to some semblance of linearity and order, just as the traditional written commands readers to follow a strict order of comprehension (Kress, 2005), when we began our synopsis’ with a signal of the medium, and a corresponding title. When comparing this manner of structure with other colleagues, it became evident that this approach was the most common manifestation of architecture with respect to an emoji story. As far as I am aware, there are no formal conventions on how to construct a narrative consisting of solely visual aspects, like emojis. Therefore, it seems interesting to me that the default pattern of assembly was through vertical methodologies; perhaps more fascinating is the deep contrast between content and form in writing with visuals. Although there are many similarities between both our emoji stories, it seems like Judy’s images are a lot more spaced out than mine. In comparing them, I feel like my story is attempting to jam a lot more information into each line, while Judy is more delicate with the chose information. Despite these types of electronic hieroglyphs representing an extremely new medium of communication in human history, our automatic reaction was to revert to the style of the scroll. 

Comparatively, only a few participants in the Emoji story task utilized a horizontal approach to arranging their synopsis’. For example, Anne Emberline’s story took a linear form, similar to that of traditional writing structures. Anne was unique in that she opted to relay her story using image after image, attempting to build meaning using the fundamental processes of reading and writing we currently use. Interestingly, one of the things I commented on Anne’s posting was that although I totally comprehended what her narrative meant, I had no idea what exactly was the movie, game, book, or show. Consequently, this put Kress’ assertion of “that which I can depict, I depict” (Kress, 2005). at odds with our interpretations as I have only negotiated an insubstantial meaning specific to me, while others could infer something completely different, or alternatively, nothing at all. 

Anne’s Emoji Story

What exactly prompts this style of organization? Why was it that most used line breaks to separate ideas, while others simply rattled off emoji after emoji with the hopes of creating meaning. I believe there is something to be said about our semiotic abilities to discern direction and instruction from punctuation. Writing is a marriage of words and symbolic markings, both of which direct meaning making within our minds as we decipher information through written words. With respect to the emoji stories, it is my interpretation that each line break indicated a new idea, new sentence, or new concept. I had a more difficult time deciphering Anne’s story than I did Judy’s.

Finally, Judy makes a compelling argument regarding the addition of images to text (in the form of graphic novels) becoming a driving factor for the increased interest levels of young readers. She posits an interesting connection between our human ability to read emotion and facial expressions as a means of inferring deeper about a particular story. While I agree with her assertions, I can’t help but think of some of the defining principles of Jean Piaget’s cognitive development model – I believe that at a certain point, our human minds crave a new challenge as they can formally operate within deeper texts; the image/word relationship begins to become commonplace. Moreover, our processing of both text and image pertains strictly to the visual sense. While Bolter makes this word/image relationship case with respect to internet models of publication, I can foresee a bit of a harkening back to the age of orality, where some of our future texts will be truly multi-modal; demanding an aural, visual, tactile, and perhaps even our gustatory or olfactory senses.

 

Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kress (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22

Task 6 – An Emoji Story

In keeping with some semblance of linearity and order, I did start with the book’s title. Perhaps this was me instinctively appealing to the traditional written word, influencing the reader to follow a strict order of comprehension while needing to interpret word-signifiers (Kress, 2005). This notion may not specifically apply when ‘reading’ emojis. Even still, it became increasingly difficult to keep the sequencing of ideas consistent and transcribe every word itself, or the meaning of a word collection for that matter, into strict hieroglyphic-type structures. Before attempting the emoji-transcription, I wrote out what I would have said had I been asked to write a description of the book and its plot. From there, I worked on assigning suitable emojis to express what would have been said through text. 

Kress asserts that “words are (relatively) empty entities – in a semiotic account they are signifiers to be filled with meaning rather than signs full of meaning, and the task of the reader is to fill these relatively vacant entities with her or his meaning” (Kress, 2005). Although I do not wholly agree with this characterization of words, I do think it is exceptionally true for this exercise and our interpretation and communication through the use of emoji images. This task was certainly harder than I expected it to be, and I did choose this work based on how much I presumed I would be able to express through image rather than text. 

As I reflected on this process, it became clear to me that I was attempting to translate each word into an image; this strategy quickly proved near impossible. I then began to assign an emoji symbol to a number of conceptual ideas, hoping to illustrate a collection of words and meanings with a singular image. This proved to be slightly easier but still exceptionally challenging considering there are a finite amount of emoji symbols; I quickly learned that not every word/ concept has an emoji. I began asking: “Why isn’t there an emoji for this??” (A cannon or for example, or an equal sign!). Moreover, it was difficult to organize ideas and sentences without punctuation; I opted to indicate a new sentence by writing on a new line, evoking the image of the scroll once again. There are a number of emojis that include words in them, such as “soon”, “back”, and “top” and I may have got away with a technicality on using those – Although they are considered emoji symbols, they do have specific text incorporated in them. I also appealed to a number of mathematical symbols and used them as one would use an article in the English language. Funny how there is no equal sign emoji…

It’s clear that at first glance, the meaning of my ‘emoji book review’ is ambiguous and leaves much up to the reader to interpret. I couldn’t help but relate this to the Egyptian hieroglyphs example that Hayles describes as negotiating meaning among several images. No one emoji indicated one word, rather it was a collection of them that produced some approximation of meaning:

Meaning was thus negotiated among several images, and it was their interrelation that determined significance rather than a one-to-one correlation between mark and sound (Hayles, 2003).

Similarly, my emoji synopsis reflects the same type of idea. It is a grouping of images that creates one meaning, word, or sound and those meanings are negotiated by the reader. Different readers may come up with different interpretations, but with that said, I believe the central essence and meaning of the ‘text’ will be maintained. Kress describes a similar idea when dealing with the computer screen as the contemporary canvas: “it is dominated by the logic of image—means that the practices of reading becoming dominant are the practices derived from the engagement with image and/or depiction in which the reader designs the meaning from materials made available on the screen” (Kress, 2005).

To view this notion practically, I look at the Google Doc in which I currently am writing these words and perceive an overwhelming number of symbolic representations, each of which have meaning and purpose in the creation of these words. The “X” means to close a specific window, the “B” is to bold letters, the “paperclip” means to link, etc. I’m sure there are some symbols that many users are simply unsure about and are uncertain about their purpose. Can they assume their meaning based on the icon? Can the same be said about emojis? I think the difference here, however, is that each one of these symbols indicates a specific action in relation to word processing, whereas emojis were not designed to be used to transcribe the written word but rather to primarily express a human emotion.

Hayles, K. (2003). Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature. Culture Machine Vol. 5, online.

Kress (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22

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