Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?
For this activity, I felt it was necessary to outline the category first and then the book’s title so it was clear to my colleagues viewing my emojis. My hope is if a person viewing my emoji story can recognize the title, the rest will be easy to follow! Initially, I used https://emojikeyboard.io; however, I could not search for emojis, and it did not copy and paste correctly onto my document. Instead, I explored https://emojipedia.org and, using the website’s search tool, I selected the best-suited emojis to accurately convey my story title.
Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?
Working on this task made me think of the YouTube video that went viral in 2015/2016, “Frozen as Told by Emoji”. Although the video is substantially more complex than the simplistic emoji story I created, it could be used as inspiration for how emojis and minimal wording could accurately and interactively retell an entire movie in a matter of minutes. Bolter (2001) suggests that images have the ability to bypass written work altogether. I continued to view the different Disney Emoji stories on YouTube and felt Bolter’s statement to be accurate. Emojis can rewrite messages, jokes or implied comments without texting a single word. I use emojis regularly when texting, but I’m curious if the current generation uses emojis as regularly as mine, or do they use a different form of expression?
I have attached the Frozen as Told by Emoji YouTube video for those interested.
Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?
I primarily focused on individual words rather than trying to blend words; thankfully, my book choice was simplistic enough that most of the emojis were present to embed into my story. As Bolter (2001) suggests, emojis/visual images provide viewers with a visual experience that allows for an appropriate realization. Therefore, for my emoji story to be accurate, I went page by page and selected the most important words/theme of the page and chose the emojis accordingly. After reviewing my emoji combination and running it by my husband for a quick accuracy check, I felt pleased with the result. I’d also like to note this is one of my daughter’s favourite stories!
References
Chapter 4. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110
Okay, that is one of my favourite books!!! I used to read this to my daughter all the time when she was younger, and she really enjoyed the story and the beautiful artwork on each page 🙂 That is how I recognized your emoji story right away. Thank you for sharing this beautiful book….I will leave the answer to your emoji story near the end of my comments, so not to spoil the answer for others who will try to figure it out 🙂
“The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle and its basically about growing up, changing, acknowledging your health, self-control, overall well-being and happiness. The main character is a caterpillar who eats more and more each day, and worse food (junk food) later until it doesn’t feel well. Finally, the caterpilar goes back to eating it’s original, simple diet of a “nice leaf” which makes the caterpillar feel healed/better. Eventually the beautiful, young caterpillar morphs into a beautiful butterfly. Thank you for sharing and I hope you don’t mind me utilizing your task for one of my reflections/linking assignments… – Selene εїз
PS. I love the video link too!
The very hungry caterpillar?! I LOVE that book!! (who doesn’t?!) If correct, you made good use of emojis to represent the story as I was able to recognize the plot almost instantly. Great work! I also use emojis regularly, they add to the text!
Hi Katherine! I know of the book but have never flipped through its pages, so I’m going to give this a try!
Baby book: The Very Hungry Caterpillar
At night the caterpillar sleeps
In the morning the caterpillar is hungry
What should the caterpillar eat?
The caterpillar eats one apple
The caterpillar eats two pears
The caterpillar eats three grapes
The caterpillar eats four strawberries
The caterpillar eats five oranges
The caterpillar eats cake, ice cream, candy, a hot dog, and watermelon
The caterpillar is full and wants to sleep
The caterpillar goes home and sleeps
The caterpillar turns into a butterfly
I hope I got most of the key words haha!
Similar to what you shared, I also found that I had to distill my emoji story down to the most important words and themes. I thought this was particularly interesting considering Kress’ (2005) point that “there is a finite stock of words … on the other hand there is an infinitely large potential of depictions” (Kress, 2005, p. 15). Emojis are depictions, but there are less emojis than there are words, at least for now!
I’m curious — how closely did the emojis resemble the ones in the book, and did it matter in this case that they didn’t 100% resemble what’s in the book?
References
Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of text, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 22(1), 5-22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004