Can you guess the story?
Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?
In this emoji story, I relied entirely on ideas. I used each emoji to represent an idea/object. For instance, the moon emoji represents the moon.
To be honest, I originally, misread the assignment and thought we could plot OR title. I ended up exploring many smaller options. One I won’t be sharing is 101 Dalmatians where I was going to literally type out 101 dogs and find an emoji font that had dalmatians.
Relying on emojis as words
Relying on the reader to remember iconic scenes/moments from the story
Relying on the reader to remember a TLDR version of the story
In this case, I was thinking of how best to simplify a story in one Emoji sentence but still be recognizable.
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Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?
I started with the title in the first line. I think this links to my experience playing the board game Concept.
Concept is essentially pictionary with icons. I used it in a program for students on academic probation and suspension to teach them how to take notes:
- There’s a Main Idea Question Mark and matching related coloured cubes and Sub Idea Exclamation Marks and matching related coloured cubes
- This sets up a hierarchy and connections of subordination
- Order can matter
- The number of related cubes placed can show emphasis or amount
- When students play this game, they get some word or phrase to describe using icons
- As everyone guesses, we’ll later take up the answer and discuss why the players chose the specific icons and order. We also discuss how to link ideas or expand upon them
- The follow up task after playing is to create a mind map
Let’s say I was describing milk, I might use this sequence:
- Main idea: Food
- Liquid
- White
- Sub idea: Animal
- Black
- White
With this game experience, I organized my emoji story from title and then plot in chronological order. The main idea is the title because that’s what I’m describing. There are line breaks to suggest a “paragraph” to show where I remember the turning points in the story to be.
Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?
My friends tell me that I watch very obscure movies (e.g., the only Jim Carrey movies I’ve watched are his serious ones: Finding Neverland, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), so this was also a task of selecting a movie that people may more likely to know and hoping that I can remember the movie!
I also chose this specific movie because I remember the plot, there are more emojis available that can help me convey it more easily, and I really like its original soundtrack. From playing Concept, there were many times when the students explained their rationale for the icon hierarchy that we would all be surprised.
Concept provides players with an icon legend, like a “common language” for all to use, but frequently players select icons to represent ideas that are personally relevant or meaningful to them. The icons, like the emojis, connect back to the languages players are already familiar with and influence our thinking. Very much like how Lera Boroditsky discussed multilingual speakers and cross-cultural differences in her talk!
I also changed the emoji font several times. I started with the Emoji Keyboard, shared it on Facebook to show my boyfriend, got him to send it to me through WhatsApp, and then I texted it to him through my Android phone. The emojis looked the cutest as a text via Android. I had my boyfriend share screenshots on what he saw on his iPhone and the sight was not as aesthetically pleasing!
The alt text experience
As you’ll see in the next section, I’ve added text-only transcripts for each of my emoji stories because I uploaded all my stories as images. Doing this made me realize how visual emojis are and that the text doesn’t really capture what is seen. The emojis, as an affordance, are heavily sight based. If I had to guess what the emoji stories were based on the text descriptions, it would be much harder because some of the emojis were selected based on what I thought they were (e.g., I thought the apparently tanabata tree was bamboo) and loose connections (e.g., I was hoping the moon emoji beside the Moai would be seen as a rock). Emoji to text is not a direct translation and many of the visual elements that I used to communicate are lost. My emoji story with waves was set up as scene, but this composition is lost when put into text.
I think it would be much harder for people to read the alternative descriptions and try to guess the story. We would end up having an interesting game of broken telephone: story > emoji > text > image > story. With all these levels of “translation”, which is really medium jumping, affordances are lost and gained such that the original understanding is skewed. With each medium swap and interpretation, the story shifts.
Perhaps to preserve the story in the future, more text should describe things like composition and emoji choice. I was also hesitant with my alt text descriptions and how I normally do alt text (based on the context!) because I didn’t want to give away the stories. Should I have described the “older man” with his skin tone since I didn’t use the default? What does “older man” mean? Like with Concept, I can anticipate how we will impose our other languages and literacies upon the emojis and the written word to construct our own ideas.
I thought of maybe coding in the text descriptions under the images and using a span or div code for screen reader only, but I decided against it so that others can explore the alt text. I thought this entry was going to be shorter! It’s hard to balance the visuals of this entry because I don’t want the text description to break the flow. I added the anchor linking in anticipation that people might want to see the text description and then go back to where they were before.
If you don’t want to read the alt text descriptions, skip to the bottom of this entry.
Alternative Text Descriptions for Emoji Stories
Can you guess the story? Emoji Story
open book, crown, Japanese dolls, full moon
snow capped mountain, older man, older woman, snow capped mountain
older man, pick, tanabata tree, baby, tanabata tree
older man, pick, tanabata tree, money bag, money bag, kimono, money bag, money bag, tanabata tree
red heart, older man, baby, older woman, red heart
baby, rightwards arrow, girl
snow capped mountain, tanabata tree, multiple musical notes, girl, boy, group of boys, melon, pig, multiple musical notes, tanabata tree, snow capped mountain
older man, older woman, thought balloon, girl, rightwards arrow, princess
older man, girl, older woman, rightwards arrow, Japanese castle
girl, rightwards arrow, princess
princess, leftwards arrow, heart with arrow, man with gua pi mao, man with gua pi mao, man with gua pi mao, man with gua pi mao, man with gua pi mao
man with gua pi mao, gem stone, herb, rightwards arrow, cross mark
man with gua pi mao, fire, rate, rightwards arrow, cross mark
man with gua pi mao, dragon face, ferry, rightwards arrow, face screaming in fear, cross mark
man with gua pi mao, hibiscus, snow capped mountain, tulip, rightwards arrow, cross mark
man with gua pi mao, spiral shell, rightwards arrow, skull
princess, leftwards arrow, heart with arrow, crown
princess, folded hands, full moon
right anger bubble, princess, full moon, crown, right anger bubble
older man, older woman, broken heart, princess
baby angel, kimono, princess, rightwards arrow, waving hand, red heart, earth globe Asia-Australia, older man, older woman
baby angel, baby angel, princess, baby angel, baby angel, rightwards arrow, full moon
Back to Can you guess the story?
Emojis as words Emoji Story
snowflake, white square
Back to Relying on emojis as words
Iconic scenes Emoji Story 1
island, island, island, island, island
water wave, water wave, water wave, water wave, water wave
moon, moai, pineapple, sponge
Back to Relying on the reader to remember iconic scenes/moments from the story
Iconic scenes Emoji Story 2
red heart
dog face, spaghetti, dog face
Back to Relying on the reader to remember iconic scenes/moments from the story
TLDR Emoji Story 1
dog, soccer ball, baseball, tennis ball, basket ball, volleyball, american football, rugby ball, tennis racket and ball
Relying on the reader to remember a TLDR version of the story
TLDR Emoji Story 2
mouse face, cooking, eggplant, tomato, zucchini, onion
Relying on the reader to remember a TLDR version of the story
TLDR Emoji Story 3
balloon, clown, knife, knife, knife
Relying on the reader to remember a TLDR version of the story