Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?
I relied on combinations of emojis to represent ideas. At first I incorporated punctuation to mark sentence breaks, but then I figured that that would be cheating in sense. I suppose my separation into separate parts cut some corners but there weren’t any parameters in the task that prevented me to do so.
Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?
I decided to show the title at the end of my emoji story since it is a clear giveaway. Anyone who has seen this television show would immediately recognize the Emoji title. For those who haven’t seen nor heard of it, the emojis could correspond to different immediate words / ideas. Looking back, I see that I did include the title of episode one in the first four emojis and this could be a clear giveaway to those who have seen this show.
Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?
I chose this work simply because it is current and people are talking about it! I wanted the blog viewers to be satisfied in having figured out the title and I was hoping that they would then try to construct meaning in the emoji “phrases”. I wanted my excerpt to differ from the Emoji Dick sample because there were too few emojis to help the “reader” decode the text. Five + times + nose + Yen increase + question + strong arm + sunflower = “It is a way I have of driving….” Am I missing something here? Was this emoji phrase a substitution for text as opposed to the translation being the subsequent line?
An avid emoji user, I found this task quite fun! Kress (2005) states: “[s]peech and writing tell the world; depiction shows the world”. With that in mind, I posit that a more poignant depiction tool than the emoji is the GIF (Graphic Interchange Format). This task could be modified by utilizing GIFs instead of emojis (or perhaps a combination of both). Both emojis and GIFs have the capacity to convey messages easier than through text on Smartphones. Often, tone and message are misinterpreted as this form of writing is telling the world (specific recipient(s) in this case) a thought devoid of the nuances of speech. That isn’t to say that GIFs consistently convey clear messages and context is everything.
Is Cartoon Shatner’s expression a response to juicy gossip, a surprising announcement, or a follow-up to a sassy text from the sender to the recipient? Is he indeed being sarcastic, as the tile of his GIF Sarcastic Shatner, denotes?
References:
Kress (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22.