Deborah’s initial remarks were, “the biggest challenge for this task was finding the appropriate emojis”. I also faced this issue! I am pretty familiar with the emoji keyboard offered by Apple, however, I found it challenging to copy those emojis over, as Deborah said. So alternatively I opted for the emoji keyboard recommended in the assignment instructions. Unfortunately, there are significantly fewer emoji options on the emoji keyboard than on the Apple keyboard. Clearly, the emoji keyboard needs to do an update.
Similarly, I also found that I was spending considerable time trying to copy and paste the emojis over and edit my story to include all the relevant emojis. There were SEVERAL instances where I had completed my story (or so I thought) and then later realized that a few emojis were missing or something was in the wrong order. But the keyboard does not let you edit the emojis once they are in their line, so on several occasions I had to redo my whole emoji story. The lack of functionality of the emoji keyboard was frustrating, but then I also found out that WordPress does not support emojis and I needed to take a screenshot, adding another element of resistance to this endeavor. Deborah wrote, “Even when I entered into my post, this platform does not want to support them and all I got at the end was lines of question marks. I finally had to screenshot the Word document to create a .png and upload it onto the page as an image.” The two following factors, limited emojis to convey my story and the inability to edit my story, ended up meaning that my story was relatively short and underdeveloped.
I think Deborah’s reference to how we are told to present slides (with limited text and supportive images) was a really strong connection to how we interpret the relationship between text and image. It reminded me of how my company uses Slack, with an aggressive amount of custom emojis. I even have a collection of emojis with my facial expressions that I can use to reply to threads, demonstrating how I feel about a situation – without actually having to reply with my words.
