emoji – Tzu Hsu Chu

Task 6: A Emoji Story

I wanted to link to Trista’s post, similar to my Emoji story, the title was not in an English language, therefore we both had to go in roundabout ways to describe them.

Please take a look at Trista’s post before reading the following, as it will contain spoilers to her Emoji story!

The movie that Trista chose was Mulan, which is not very apparent from the Emojis that she chose, UNLESS, you know Chinese.

Mu: 木 is the character for wood

Lan: 蘭 is the character for orchid

Given that, I presumed that Trista has knowledge of the Chinese language, which I was able to confirm after going back to her Task 1: What’s In My Bag blogpost. I was able to know that Trista was born and raised in Shanghai, China, and moved to Canada 7 years ago.

“I started with the title, and actually, I chose this movie because I feel that the title is easy to visualize by emojis” (Ding, 2022), which contrasted with the comments from Jessica and Emily about unable to figure out what movie it is. Some guesses included “wood flower”, “log flower”, “log blooms”. I found this quite amusing , as this is definitely a case of information being lost in translation!

I am unsure if this is the case for Trista in Shanghai, but The Ballad of Mulan is a required piece of poetry in our education curriculum in Taiwan. The context in which I learned about it is very different to the one that of a Western audience.

I think most people know of Mulan in the context of the Disney movie. Therefore, if Trista were able to narrow down the category of movies to “Disney”, it might be a helpful hint, especially for those who do not have the linguistic or cultural background that Trista and I both share.

Trista then continues a chronological re-telling of the story through emojis. Similar to my experiences, Trista mentions “spending a lot of time selecting events that the emoji can represent” (Ding, 2022) as the emoji choices can feel limiting when it comes to more general and abstract concepts.

Even without the movie title, given the events that happened:

Mulan deciding to cut her hair to look like a boy, enrolls in the army on behalf of her father was one of the big transitions in the plot, which Trista made clear with the “haircut” Emoji, and one that reaffirmed my guess.

Reflection

One thing that Trista’s post made me think about a lot is this concept of “common ground” in Linguistics. For successful conversation and communication to happen, there is a presumed background information shared by participants in the conversation.

From the phrase ” I chose this movie because I feel that the title is easy to visualize by emojis” she is leaving out “the title is easy to visualize by emojis (for her given the cultural and linguistic context)” which is normal and natural for someone who is immersed in that context, after all, how would a fish know it is in water?

Along the same topic, Trista ties multi-modal communication with Kress’ commentary, adding on that “it illustrates how speech and writing are controlled by the author, and the interpretation of pictures largely depends on the viewers” which can be seen here in this instance of the author (Trista) intending “[wood emoji] [flower emoji]” to be “Mulan” whereas the viewers (Jessica and Emily) interpreted it differently.

All in all, this is to say, that in the same time we are using multi-modal communication to express ourselves, there is also a need to review and unpack what we assume to be “common ground” amongst us and others participating in the conversation, in order to meet each other in the middle such that what we are expressing, is also what others can interpret.

References

Ding, T. ( 2022, June 25) Task 6: A Emoji Story. ETEC540 Personal Web Space. https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540trista/2022/06/25/task-6-a-emoji-story/

Reflection

Recently, the newest software update on my phone added new emojis to my keyboard. This was really helpful to describe more “tangible” ideas in the TV show, such as the characters and the setting of the story. I found it challenging to describe the more abstract concepts, such as the translation of the title, as it was an attribute of the character in the story in a non-English language. I would put emojis into smaller clusters as a “constituent” to show that they belonged together as a unit, and a space in between the next cluster.

The way that I clustered emojis together to express a concept reminds me of Blissymbols, an ideographic writing system with basic symbols that could be composed together to generate new symbols to represent different concepts. The creator Charles K. Bliss developed this system during his refugee in the Shanghai Ghetto during exile as a Jew during 1942-1949. He was inspired by the logographic nature of Chinese characters, which he learned during his time there.

Here are some basic symbols and what they look like:

There are ways to compound the symbols to form more complex words:

The word “friend” is represented by:

person

feeling

positive ( plus + intensity)

Apparently, after reading more about emojis and how it works in Unicode, one can modify the emojis to join them as well!

With a zero-width-joiner (a non-printing character used in computerized typesetting), one can compound multiple emojis that behaves like a single unique emoji character.

An example taken from the Wikipedia entry of “joining emojis“:

Originally, Blissymbols was created for as a universal language for speakers of different languages could communicate with each other. It wasn’t until the 1970s that it gradually became a communication aid for people with limited or no ability to use spoken or written languages.

In regards to emojis, a primary function of emojis is to fill in the gaps of emotional cues that we would otherwise miss in typed and written conversations.

However, I think one main distinction between Blissymbols and Emojis is that the former is an attempt at abstraction of language where one can rely only on the symbols to convey meaning, whereas the latter is more a synthesis between language and symbols to create meaning.

Kress (2005) differentiated that words are founded on order, and image-representations are founded on depictions, with the main crucial difference of words being highly “conventionalized” entities, such that they will always be general and vague, nearly empty of meaning, which need to be filled with the reader’s meaning.

In terms of images and its depictions, Kress states:

With depiction and with images the situation is
different: that which I wish to depict I can depict, at the moment at any rate. I can draw whatever
I like whenever I like to draw it. Unlike words, depictions are full of meaning; they are always specific. So on the one hand there is a finite stock of words—vague, general, nearly empty of meaning; on the other hand there is an infinitely large potential of depictions—precise, specific, and full of meaning.

I think his differentiation reveals a big reason why emojis are useful and important when it comes to interpreting and meaning making in text messages, for example.

A message can be interpreted differently from the sender’s intention vs the receiver’s perception. A message with an emoji can however provide more information with the depiction of the symbol, which in turn grounds the message to a specific meaning.

Both Blissymbols and Emojis are concretely grounded in their visual medium, as one can really only engage with these two systems through reading and writing as part of the trend to renegotiate the relationship between arbitrary signs and picture elements in communication (Bolter, 2001).

References

Blissymbols [Online image]. https://omniglot.com/writing/blissymbolics.htm

Blissymbols (n.d.) Wikipedia. Retrieved June 21, 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols

Emojis (n.d.) Wikipedia. Retrieved June 21, 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Chapter 4. in Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

Kress (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learningLinks to an external site.. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22.

Tag: emoji

Linking Task 6: An Emoji Story (Trista)

Reflection

References

Task 6: An Emoji Story

Reflection

References