Thread by @visual_linguist

On Monday I’ll be speaking at the Emoji2021 workshop
@icwsm, so I figured it’d be a good time to do an emoji thread, because I’ve now been involved both with creating emoji and with doing research about their cognition /1 emoji2021.aiisc.ai

The latest emoji update has now started hitting phones, including the Face Exhaling/Breath Face Emoji (😮‍💨) which I actually proposed along with @jenniferdaniel! So, here's a bit about how it came to be /2 emojipedia.org/face-exhaling/

Several years ago @jenniferdaniel and I started discussing how to improve on the emoji faces. Many emoji began as influenced from the vocabulary of Japanese manga ( 😣🍆💢💩😍😱😰😅🥺😭😪), as you can see in our list of manga symbology /3 visuallanguagelab.com/A/jvlmorpholog…

So we started compiling a list comparing existing and possible emoji to other symbology from comics and manga. You’ll see both the breath face 😮‍💨 and face in the clouds 😶‍🌫️ on that list /4 unicode.org/L2/L2019/19390…

The puff of smoke for a sigh was what we called a “breath mushroom” in our original analyses of symbology (“morphology”) from Japanese manga, which often uses a slightly more stylized version of it /5 visuallanguagelab.com/A/jvlmorpholog…

The breath face had actually been a Samsung emoji that had disappeared because of cross-platform consistency. We proposed to bring it back /6 unicode.org/L2/L2020/20066…

The version that @jenniferdaniel made in our proposal was actually based on my own drawing we’ve used in experiments! The actual ones now vary depending on the platform /7 thevisuallinguist.com/2016/09/new-pa…

We looked to comics symbology as already established conventions, which might make them easier to be adopted as emoji. Sometimes, new emoji weren’t proposed if existing emoji could combine, like 😮💡, which is “close enough” to the bulb above the head in a single emoji /8

Once emoji are proposed, they are then discussed and possibly approved by the Unicode Consortium, which actually receives many proposals every year for new emoji, only a fraction of which get selected /9 home.unicode.org

For more about emoji, here’s my blog post where I dispel some myths about emoji, like how emoji are not like Egyptian hieroglyphs, and there’s no such thing as a “universal language” even in graphics /10 thevisuallinguist.com/2015/11/dispel…

I go into these issues a bit more in my older article for @BBC_Future on “Will emoji become a new language?” where I point out that emoji are limited in their ability to combine, and lack a natural grammar /11 bbc.com/future/article…

This aspect of emoji grammar was also explored in our experimental paper, "The grammar of emoji? Constraints on communicative pictorial sequencing” which showed that emoji sequencing doesn’t use the type of sequencing characterized by a complex syntax /12 …itiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.11…

I also have some follow up work on the emoji lexicon and grammar coming soon with @bpweissman, who along with @AdricDirac previously did work on how emoji can imply irony when combined with sentences /13 journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

We have several additional face emoji that are under review inspired by conventions from comics, so hopefully you’ll see some more coming soon! /end unicode.org/L2/L2020/Regis…