For this activity, I chose a book that I recently read for a book club I belong to. I really enjoyed this book. So much so that I read it over a weekend. I chose this book simply because it was my most recent read so the story is still fresh in my mind.

I mulled over this activity for a few days and first thought of how I can use the emojis I already know to represent the book title. I like to complete tasks in order, so I started with the book title. As mentioned in Kress (2005) the order in which we view and use books are “firmly coded” (p. 7) so when I think of the order of a book go from book title to author to contents.

After I envisioned the title, I opened the Google Keep notes app on my phone and started searching for the emojis I needed to make the title. In the title I used three emojis to represent one word. I found that one specific emoji did not capture the whole essence of the word I was trying to replace. This act of using more than one emoji to replace a word or idea was done throughout the activity.

I was only able to create short “sentences” with the images and I could not go into great detail of what happened in the book. As I was talking myself through the activity, I noticed I was forming sentences like a comical version of a cave woman (ex., Girl and boy fall in love. Girl okay. Girl is sick.). I decided to use one sentence per line of my emoji story as I wanted to clearly mark where one event started and ended. So even though I am using symbols for this activity I am still using them as if they are words and following the structure of a typical book.

I used an arrow emoji several times in my story but noticed afterwards the arrow had different meanings throughout the story. For example, sometimes I used the arrow to indicate a change in state, to go somewhere, the transference of an object, and communication of information. I am relying on the reader to use the context of the story and the order of the emojis to deduce which meaning of the arrow to use (Kress, 2005).

I focused on replacing words and ideas with emojis because I found that much easier than trying to replace syllable of words with emojis. However, once again I am relying on the reader to use their imagination and our shared understanding of cultural symbols in some of the sentences because there just wasn’t an appropriate symbol to use. For example, I used a crab emoji to symbolize cancer. In astrology, the symbol for the cancer sign is the crab. But in my story, I am referring to the disease of cancer. I am curious to see how other people interpret the symbols I used and how their exposure to different cultures affected the interpretation of my story.

This task reminded me of when I was an ELL Instructor, and I often drew images on the whiteboard to try and explain words and concepts. Sometimes words were not enough when explaining something to a learner so using images helped to make things click for a learner. But with this task I was limited with the images available in the suit of emojis. With drawing I am only limited by my ability to draw something in a recognizable way.

Lastly, Kress (2005) stated that “Speech and writing are, above all, modes founded on words in order, and image representation is founded on depictions” (p. 15). For this activity, I was forced to use a written book format because of the limitations of emojis. Emojis are written in lines, so I was compelled to make sentences and order the sentences based on the events in the book. However, if there was an easy to use tool where I could drag and drop the emojis to any space on the page I could have created one whole image to depict the book. I think that this method would have allowed me to represent more of the complexity of the story in the book.

Reference

Kress, G. (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 2(1), 5-22.