What New Emoji from 14.0 Are We Excited About?

At Emoji Foundation we are excited about the bubble emoji, because it is long overdue and iridescent. And speaking of things that are shiny, there is also a mirror ball.

We foresee the low battery and eyes brimming with tears being crowd pleasers and personal daily use Emoji. As they both are useful for expressing everyday feelings. Who hasn’t felt like they had low batteries and and needed a recharge? Similarly, I picture the eyes brimming with tears as a popular Tiktok video response in the days to come.

The New 14.0 Emoji Set

The new emoji in the set are listed in Emoji Recently Added v12.0, with sample images. The new Emoji typically start showing up on mobile phones in September/October — some platforms may release them earlier.

We are so excited to finally have interracial couple Emoji, which is something we have called for at Emoji Foundation for a while now. Other notable characters are the drop of blood, sea otter (a personal favorite) and disability emoji. Whose life could be complete without a yawning emoji? And finally, the oyster emoji, which is apparently the end of sexism.

FINALLY, SEXISM IS OVER https://t.co/XjBTkKQYAK

— Christine Love (@christinelove) February 5, 2019

Without Further Ado, the 59 new Emoji

Unicode has selected March 5 as the release date for Unicode 12.0. This is when the final emoji list for 2019 will be published (Emoji 12.0 is currently still being decided upon), alongside of course, other Unicode characters being added this year.

In The News

Children Are Using Emoji for Digital-Age Language Learning

I wanted to find out not only whether kids were texting emoji but which emoji, and why? How do they organize emoji into sequences and ideas, and how do these early ramblings shift as kids learn to read?

wired.com

Poop Emoji Reborn As Soft Serve Ice Cream

kotaku.com

 How We Apologize Now

Zara Rahim, who handled publicity for Vogue before joining The Wing, a women’s co-working space, as its communications director, said that the efficacy of these statements lies not only in their speed but also their appearance. “I can just write this quick note on my Notes app, because it looks like I did it on my phone, have my publicist take a quick glance at it, if I’m smart,” she said, “and then post it directly on my Instagram.”

nytimes.com

EMOJI CONFERENCE

May of this year will usher in Emoji 2019: 2nd​ International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media. Co-located with The Web Conference 2019 (formerly WWW)

Overall 2019 is going to give us some of the new emoji we have been waiting for. We will continue to learn and expand our understanding of these little symbols.

Emoji 2019 aims to stimulate research on understanding social, cultural, communicative, and linguistic roles of emoji and developing novel approaches to analyze, interpret and understand emoji and their usage in social media applications. It provides a forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry in the areas of social network analysis and mining, natural language processing, computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, and computational social sciences to discuss high-quality research and emerging applications, to exchange ideas and experience, and to identify new opportunities for collaboration.

We hope to see you there!

Today we will decode the mystery of Snapchat’s Emoji Status!

Business Insider

Snapchat,  the company that’s logo looks remarkably similar to the Ghost Emoji, uses these “friend emojis,” to help you keep track of your relationships . They are pre-set for every user, but also they are customizable. However, it’s not always easy to tell what the emoji mean.

Here is the Emoji Foundation guide to the meanings behind every Snapchat emoji.

The gold heart is for best friends.

Apple/Business Insider

Snapchat says a gold heart next to someone’s name means you send the most snaps to this Snapchatter, and they send the most snaps to you, too.

The red heart Emoji means you have been each other’s No. 1 best friend for over two weeks.

Apple/Business Insider

Pink hearts Emoji means you have been each other’s No. 1 best friend for over two months.

Apple/Business Insider

A grimace Emoji means you share a best friend.

Apple/Business Insider

Your best friend is also this Snapchatter’s best friend.

A smiley face Emoji means this person is one of your best friends.

Apple/Business Insider

This isn’t your No. 1 best friend, but this is a Snapchatter you send a lot of snaps to.

The sunglasses Emoji means you share a close friend with this person. Why the glasses?

Apple/Business Insider

Smirking face Emoji means you’re their best friend, but they aren’t your best friend. Burn!

Apple/Business Insider

The Flame Emoji means you’re on a Snapstreak.

Apple/Business Insider

Snapstreaks are a score  that tracks how many consecutive days you’ve snapped back and forth with a friend on Snapchat.

The hourglass Emoji will appear to warn you that your Snapstreak will end soon. Keep Snapping- OR ELSE!

Apple/Business Insider

The cake Emoji means it’s your friend’s birthday.

Apple/Business Insider

The birthday cake will appear next to your friend’s name on the date they entered as their birthday on Snapchat.

The baby Emoji used to appear when you had first become Snapchat friends with someone.

Apple/Business Insider

Now the mystery of Snapchat Emoji is a mystery no more! #themoreyouknow

“Having access to EmojiNet can help computers to interpret the meaning of emoji.” -Sanjaya Wijeratne

Sorry Freud. But when it come to emoji, a cigar isn’t always a cigar (if there was, in fact, a cigar emoji).

In 2016, Wright State University computer science Ph.D student Sanjaya Wijeratne was working to identify at-risk youth using social media posts. While following twitter accounts of the gang-affiliated youth he began to notice unique emoji uses. Tweets expressing anger towards law enforcement, for example. frequently featured gun and police officer emoji.

But the most frequently used emoji? The gas pump. “We were surprised at first, but by looking at tweets using this emoji we discovered they mainly use it when talking about drugs, because “gas” is a slang term for marijuana.”

“That’s when it first struck me that emojis could take different meanings. I saw people using the same emoji in different contexts with different meanings, and I wanted to find a resource that lists all the meanings for a particular emoji.”

Flash forward to EmojiNet, the first machine-readable sense inventory for emoji, developed by Sanjaya and his group at Kno.e.sis, a project of Wright State University.  Since Sanjaya’s gas pump epiphany, he and his team composed of fellow graduate student Lakshika Balasuriya, and advisors Prof. Amit Seth and Dr. Derek Doran, published three papers on their work, and are currently developing applications to help computers automatically infer emoji meaning.

Semantic Search

Sanjaya’s research on emoji is closely related to the concept of semantic search, a growing area of study and application related to database and web searching. Rather than searching by keyword, semantic search considers the searcher’s intent and the context in which search terms are used to improve accuracy, and generate better results.

Semantic search has huge implications for search engine optimization, as users have begun to lengthen search queries to gain more precise results. Google recently reorganized its search algorithm to consider context and intent, prioritizing the “understanding” phase of search over “achieving”, “filtering and clustering” and “ranking”.

So how do we figure know what a word means in a given context? For us, it’s mostly subconscious. For computers? Not so much. One of the cornerstones of semantic search is word-sense disambiguation. Word-sense disambiguation is a long-term with a simple meaning: determining the meaning of a word used in a particular sense, when the word has multiple possible meanings.

So… back to emoji.

Making an Emoji Sense Inventory

Sanjaya and his team are developing programs to help computers detect and understand multiple meanings of emoji. In other words, they study emoji sense disambiguation . An easy way to understand emoji sense disambiguation is to compare the results of two open source emoji databases.

Emoji Dictionary and Emojipedia are both unicode-based emoji databases, with starkly different purposes. Emojipedia results contain static definitions of each emoji, followed each rendering of the emoji, statistics, and links to related emoji. In other words, Emojipedia is the emoji equivalent of a dictionary. An Emojipedia search for “folded hands”, for example, displays the following result:

Emoji Dictionary, on the other hand, presents fluid and contextual search results, based on  crowd-sourced definitions, nouns, verbs, adjective, and adverbs. Like Urban Dictionary, Emoji Dictionary explores multiple meaning of emoji based on content and intent. Compare the previous “folded” definition to Emoji Dictionary’s results:

Whereas Emojipedia gives a short, concise definition of the “folded hands” emoji, Emoji Dictionary, on the other hand,  provides a flexible list nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs and examples, indicative of user intent and context.

Sanjaya and his team’s goal was to create a machine readable “sense inventory” of emoji, so computers could understand the semantic meaning of an emoji in a particular sentence. Upon discovery of several open source emoji databases online, including Unicode Consortium, Emoji Dictionary, iEmoji and Emojipedia. the team extracted contextual and part of speech meaning (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) of each emoji from Emoji Dictionary, then integrated the information with Babelnet, a multilingual semantic dictionary and database dedicated to word-sense disambiguation.

Thus was born EmojiNet.

EmojiNet

EmojiNet is the first machine-readable sense inventory for emoji, linking emoji represented as Unicode with English language meanings from the Web. By integrating online emoji databases with Babelnet, EmojiNet allows users to infer sense definitions from communication using emoji. For a better picture, check out EmojiNet results for “folded hands“.

“Emoji plays a huge role in deciding the sentiment or emotion of a particular text. But in certain platforms, and certain carriers, emoji are shown differently. If you look at how people use face with tears of joy emoji, they mostly use it to express happiness, but sometimes it is associated with sadness too. But if we build an application that can disambiguate emoji meanings, we’d be able to tell the meanings of an emoji in a text context, that would have a direct impact on applications such as sentiment and emotion analysis.”

The team is also focused on measuring emoji similarity by determining pairs of emojis frequently used together to  enhance semantic search, and develop applications to automatically process and infer meaning from emoji based communication. These applications could improve web and database search, sentiment analysis, and interface design. Grouping similar emoji together on mobile keyboards, for example, could make texting with emoji less time consuming.

What’s Next?

Sanjaya and his team’s attempts to promote his team’s paper were frustrated by the current administration’s immigration policy. When the group’s paper was accepted at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Sanjaya was unable to attend . A Sri Lankan native, Sanjaya is on a student visa. “We wanted to promote our paper at IABC , but If I left the country, I’d have to return to Sri Lanka to reapply.” With the current administration’s immigration policy, this is not a chance Sanjaya wanted to take.

Despite earlier frustration, EmojiNet is beginning to get attention from tech companies. Recently, data science platform Kaggle inducted EmojiNet as a featured dataset.  EmojiNet is also in the process of organizing an emoji prediction challenge with Google, Microsoft, and Kaggle using EmojiNet data.

Sanjaya is excited to unleash EmojiNet’s potential. “I would argue that having access to EmojiNet can help computers to interpret the meaning of emoji. We want to improve tasks such as sentiment and emotion analysis with this information.”

To learn more about EmojiNet, emoji similarity, and emoji sense disambiguation, check out these articles!

• EmojiNet: Building a Machine Readable Sense Inventory for Emoji
• EmojiNet: An Open Service and API for Emoji Sense Discovery
• A Semantics-Based Measure of Emoji Similarity
• A Semantics-Based Measure of Emoji Similarity (Poster)

Ever stay awake at night wondering which Emoji encapsulates your Meyers-Briggs personality type?

Yeah, me too.

For the unexperienced, the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator personality inventory is a series of questions that, when answered, categorize your personality based on whether you are:

• Introverted OR extroverted
• Sensing OR intuitive
• Thinking OR feeling
• Perceiving OR judging

The results are, for many, disturbingly accurate. If you haven’t taken the test, do it here.

But the question remains… what to reply when your friend asks, over text, why you sent her 5000 pics of potential hair colors for her approval, rather than just getting the one you want? Well, here you go!

INTJ =  Bar Chart Emoji

• Organized
• Idealist
• Overly analytical
• Judgmental

INTP= Light Bulb Emoji

• Inventive
• Creative
• Insensitive
• Absentminded

ENTJ= Crown Emoji

• Motivating
• Charismatic
• Stubborn
• Arrogant

ENTP= Speaking Head Emoji

• Curious
• Creative
• Argumentative
• Insensitive

INFJ= Raised Fist Emoji

• Idealist
• Sensitive
• Private
• Cause-driven

INFP= Crying Cat Face Emoji

• Idealistic
• Passionate
• Impractical
• Tendency to take things personally

ENFJ= Ear Emoji

• Helpful
• Eager to please
• Overly sensitive
• Self doubting

ENFP= Unicorn Face Emoji

• Creative
• Independent
• Unfocused
• Easily stressed

ISTJ= Balance Scale Emoji

• By the book
• Loyal
• Insensitive
• Judgmental

ISFJ= Octopus Emoji

• Supportive
• Reliable
• Shy
• Tendency to take on too much

ESTJ= File Folder Emoji

• Dedicated
• Organized
• Inflexible
• Judgemental

ESFJ= Selfie Emoji

• Dutiful
• Popular
• Needy
• Overly concerned about social status

ISTP:= Woman Scientist Emoji

• Creative
• Prioritizing
• Risk-taking
• Easily bored

ISFP= Person Lifting Weights Emoji

• Flexible
• Curious
• Overly competitive
• Easily stressed

ESTP= Shark Emoji

• Energetic
• Bold
• Impatient
• Risk prone

ESFP= Woman Dancing Emoji

• Spontaneous
• Enthusiastic
• Easily bored
• Poor planners

Now that you know how to explain your neurosis in emoji form, why not check out how your type effects your vacation, or your idea of eternal damnation? Have fun!

I was out to dinner last night with a group of friends, with a large spectrum of sexual orientations: straight, gay, lesbian, and flexible. We got to talking about how it was often hard for women, trans people, or bisexuals in a relationship to be taken seriously, or to even be seen as “gay” by others. More often than not, most bars and clubs for the queer community cater to gay men with the off ladies night. Moreover, unless women look and or dress a certain way (like Ellen) they are often not considered “Gay Enough.” They become invisible and overlooked and even denied their relationship status by many people. How does this relate to Emoji?

Recently I decided it was time to make the Emoji Dictionary a fully fledged resource. I went the same route as Fred Benenson did with Emoji Dick and used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk tool for micro jobs. Basically hundreds of anonymous people spent a few days defining all the 846 Emoji featured on the Emoji Dictionary.

When I started poking around the site and the over 4000 definitions I had commissioned by an international workforce, something caught my eye.  I looked at the definition for the two girls holding hands Emoji, there was no mention of them being gay or lesbian. Words like, “creepy girls, Girl Friends, two girls, women, and sisters” were used. The example sentences followed a similar tone: “Friendly girls hold hands to show affection.” and “Those girls holding hands are creeping me out.” So people were either seeing the Emoji as a symbol of sisterly love or it made them uncomfortable.

As technology advances, traditional avenues for connecting with others around us have become more difficult. Personal visits and aural communication gave rise to letters, letters gave rise to phone calls, phone calls gave rise to emails, email gave rise to text messages, and text messages gave rise to Emoji texts, and so on. Each new electronic technology, from Morse code to the mobile phone, has allowed us to move further from our physical selves rather than connecting with each other face-to-face.

As we move into abstracted modes of electronic and networked communication such as texts, tweets, and Emoji, we should examine, meditate upon and explore the impact this way of communicating upon our ability to connect with each other in physical space. By highlighting Emoji as creative medium we start to unpack the millions of Emoji texts and messages sent every day, and what might be emerging as a meaning-making tool beyond the chat log.

Context

Let us examine the Hikikomori in Japan, a group of mostly young men in their twenties in Japan who do not leave their house and still live with their parents. Often the only communication source they have to outside world is through technology. Combine this with Japan’s declining birth rate and young people who are losing interest in romantic partnerships and we begin to see the effects of technological disassociation. (Haworth 2014) I do not think it is a coincidence that Emoji is Japanese. There is a connection between people moving away from intimacy and connection as we begin to mediate our communication through more abstracted and reduced forms of electronic communication.

Figure 1: Concept Map

The artist Xu Bing explores the impact of images as text in his book, Book from the Ground: From Point to Point (See Figure 2).This book chronicles the narrative of one person’s experiences without words, using symbols. Having “read” book from the ground, I was able to follow the series of actions, or plot of the book. That fact surprised me, given that I was not expecting to be able to do that.

Figure 2: An excerpt from Xu Bing’s book

The Noun project is another crowd-sourced online repository for symbols and icons that are both free and paid. You can upload your own icons, or download public domain icons for free, or download paid icons through monthly licenses.

Both projects are bringing focus to symbols as meaning making tools to create narrative and explore cross-language possibilities of iconographic imagery. There are also a huge number of Emoji focused web and analog projects being created right now (See Figure 3).

Figure 3: Here are a few projects connected to Emoji

Emoji has reached a critical mass in our culture and a few things precipitated this. One is the induction of Emoji into the Unicode standard in 2010. “The Unicode Standard is a character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. In addition, it supports classical and historical texts of many written languages.” (Unicode, 2014) Introducing Emoji into Unicode allowed Apple and Google to share the same set of Unicode characters on their OS platforms.

I recently became one of 6 student members of Unicode.org because I wanted to get access to the body of people working on ratifying these characters for use in the communications industry. I am currently working on creating diverse Emoji that I will submit for review to Unicode.

Another factor affecting the changing relationship we have to Emoji is that we live in a culture where digital technology is changing the way people communicate. Sherry Turkle gave a talk recently at The New School about the lost art of conversation. She called this situation “Wait, What?” She described communication among young people as a series of disconnected micro-conversations where people fluidly drop out to check their devices and then enter back in saying “wait, what?” Basically, she has found that people are resorting to text-based communications more and more in lieu of face-to-face talking.

My interest in Emoji is that I believe it has become a prevalent form of mediated visual communication. We rely on it to give us signals and visual cues that faces and live expressions once did. (Derks et al., 2008, 766-785)

Leonard Shlain writes about language versus visual communication and the connection with dyslexia. He believes that TV has shifted our brains to move more toward the right/visual hemisphere of the brain. Traditionally, 90% of language centers live in the left side of the brain. He also points out that dyslexic people who are right handed have up to a 70/30 split with only 70% of language centers in the left side of the brain.

. . . A previously unrecognized affliction called dyslexia (nonexistent in ideographic China) broke out at alarming rates in classrooms all across Eurocentric TV-land. Dyslexic children, predominantly male (9:1), have difficulty deciphering the alphabet. One credible theory proposes that it is due to a failure of hemispheric dominance. Ninety percent of the language centers traditionally reside in the left hemisphere of right-handed people. In the right-handed dyslexic, the distribution of language centers may be more on the order of 80/20 or 70/30. Although we cannot be sure that dyslexia was not always among us, it seems to have erupted at the very moment that an entire generation was devaluing the left hemispheric mode of knowing. Perhaps television is the agent equilibrating the human brain’s two differing modes of perception. (Shlain 1998, chap. 25, loc. 7965)

This discovery leads me to believe that Emoji may be filling in the gaps for our lack of direct, present communication as the language of visual media is changing the way our minds work. As a right-handed dyslexic, this was really interesting to me and maybe explains why I have such an affinity for Emoji as an expressive mode. What does it mean that in China, where they use an ideographic language there is basically no issues of dyslexia? What can Emoji offer us in way of a meaning-making tool that is not affected by dyslexia?

Images have weightiness, and are structured differently than text. They evoke right brain responses. They turn on different thinking centers. The derived meanings are more up to the recipient. They are less definite, and therefore, they are capable of greater semiotic inscription. “Finally, and in more general terms, it appears increasingly more difficult to conceive a system of images and objects whose signifieds can exist independently of language: to perceive what a substance signifies is inevitably to fall back on the individuation of a language: there is no meaning which is not designated, and the world of signifieds is none other than that of language.” (Barthes and Lavers 1968, 10) Although Rolland Barthes may not have intended this reading, the language, to which with he refers, is becoming an increasingly visual one that allows for a blurring between the signified (the idea of the object or idea being represented) and the signifier (the word, sound, or image representing it).  Emoji is there to fill this gap and manifest the promise of a semiotic relationship that moves past words, and constitutes a language of images. My project deals with the question, how does technology mediate our relationships with each other? Does it contribute or disrupt human closeness and connection?

Target Audience

The primary audience for my project is a tech-savvy American man or woman between the ages of 18 and 44 with an interest in Japanese Emoji, art, and language. They are the early adopter sort of person who uses Twitter and texting quite frequently and enjoys adding content to websites like YouTube, Vine, and Reddit. This audience will be the one who adds definitions to Emoji in the Emoji dictionary and engages with creating content on the website. They will also engage in social sharing of the content on Facebook and Twitter to engage other to participate in this crowd sourced Emoji Dictionary. I imagine this audience as the first group to engage with the content and responsible for helping spread the word about the project. As you can see in Figure 2, 64% of the audience for Twitter is between the ages of 18-44. That audience is a similar demographic group to my own.

Figure 4: Twitter user graph

User Scenarios

 My secondary audience for the project is a less tech-savvy, middle class American man or woman who is in the 30-70 year old range. This audience member will use the dictionary as a means to uncover the meaning of Emoji texts and tweets that they have received from more Emoji-versed loved ones. This audience member is generally unlikely to add to the dictionary content, but more likely to search the content for definitions to Emoji. They are an audience for a later prototype or iteration of the World Translation Foundation Emoji Dictionary.

Mara

Mara is a 21-year-old art student living in Manhattan, who loves texting and tweeting. She uses Emoji frequently and believes it helps her express things that she could not say in words. As a person active in the creative community of New York, she heard about the World Translation Foundation from a friend on Twitter and decided to check it out. She got to the homepage and clicked on her favorite Emoji. She realized that the definition for that Emoji was not complete. She then decided to add in the definition of dancers:  Once she had done that, she shared her contribution on WTF

Jack

Jack is a 35-year-old writer living in Brooklyn. He is not very tech-savvy and rarely posts any content online other than the occasional Facebook status.  He saw a post about the WTF Emoji Dictionary from Mara on Facebook. He clicked on it because it looked fun and he some time to kill. He searched out a few Emoji and had fun playing around with the combinations of Emoji to make up new sentences. He would not add to the dictionary, but simply explore the content.

Prototyping Process

Prototype 1: World Translation Foundation Website

I am creating a database, website, and resource hub for art and thinking around these new communication forms. The project is called The World Translation Foundation.

The World Translation Foundation believes that words often get in the way of expressing how we feel. WTF is one part web project, one part tongue-in-cheek art movement, and two parts serious scholarship. While words can be cumbersome and misleading, and worst of all, they change from country to country, the pictorial alphabet of the Emoji lexicon is ubiquitous; easy to use and understand. In a tradition that dates back to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, WTF aims to educate the public in the art of letting art speak for you. Our motto is: “Let WTF transform the way you communicate, and pave the way to a quieter tomorrow!” Right now, WTF is a website hosted on a custom installation of WordPress. Contributors include Cara Rose DeFabio and Niki Selken, the author.

As a means to explore the semiotic impact of Emoji, I created the Emoji Dictionary. This is a portion of the WTF website which was built out using PHP and a MySQL database to store the Emoji codes and image locations as well as definitions. The dictionary will be a living document, allowing users to add to the definitions of each of the emoticons. Somewhere between the Noun Project and Wikipedia, the Emoji dictionary will serve as a link between pictographic communication and alphabetic, written language.

Prototype 3: A live website and MySQL database

During this phase of the project I am creating a working, hand coded and designed database with live from for user added content. The dictionary prototype started with the first 66 Emoji face characters and allow users to add definitions to each. These definitions are then be stored in the database and added to the front end of the website with PHP. I will also use this time to perform user tests of the interface design. I plan to test with my primary target audience who will fill out the definitions during this phase.

During the user testing, participants generally liked the World Translation Foundation themes and layout. There was no confusion about how to add to the dictionary or navigate the site. Many users wanted to see the Emoji Research page on the WTF blog, which was not completed. Also, there was some concern about the English-centric nature of the Emoji Dictionary. Unfortunately, due to my own language constraints the dictionary will have to launch in English. In future, I would like to use The Noun Project’s multilingual site structure as a precedent for expanding the dictionary to other languages.

Conclusion

The World Translation Foundation prototype is fully functional and interactive. The next steps for the project are to add the additional Emoji to the dictionary and then launch the website. A social media Campaign will accompany this launch process. I will also email various news sources, which report on Emoji such as Yahoo Tech, who has already published an article featuring the project and my thoughts on Emoji. (Yahoo Tech 2014)

By highlighting Emoji as creative medium we can start to unpack the millions of Emoji texts and messages sent every day, and what might be emerging as a meaning-making tool beyond the chat log. The World Translation Foundation is a project dedicated to exploring the impact Emoji is having on American culture. WTF takes the form of an Emoji art focused website as well as a database driven, crowd-sourced English to Emoji dictionary. By connecting with the online community through creating an interactive, fun, and informative exploration of Emoji. I hope to expand awareness of Emoji as a valuable, emerging iconographic and pictographic language.

Glossary

Ideographic: Ideographic refers to a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. The term “ideogram” is commonly used to describe logograms in writing systems, i.e. Chinese characters.

Pictographic: Pictographic is an ideogram that conveys its meaning by it’s graphic similarity to a physical object.

The Unicode Standard: The Unicode Standard is a character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. In addition, it supports classical and historical texts of many written languages. (Unicode, 2014)

Works Cited

“About the Unicode Standard.” Unicode Standard. Accessed May 15, 2014.

http://www.unicode.org/standard/standard.html.

“Americans and Text Messaging.” Pew Research Centers Internet American Life Project RSS. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Cell-Phone-Texting-2011/Main-Report/How-Americans-Use-Text-Messaging.aspx (accessed April 8, 2014).

Barthes, Roland, Annette Lavers, and Colin Smith. Elements of semiology. New

York: Hill and Wang, 1968.

Benenson, Fred. Emoji Dick. New York: LuLu, 2010.

Derks, Daantje, Agneta H. Fischer, and Arjan E.R. Bos. “The Role Of Emotion In Computer-mediated Communication: A Review.” Computers in Human Behavior 24, no. 3 (2008): 766-785.

“Emoji love: The science behind why we <3 emoticons.” TNW Network All Stories RSS. http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/03/10/Emoji-love-science-behind/ (accessed April 8, 2014).

Haworth, Abigail. “Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?.” The Observer. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex (accessed April 7, 2014).

Kok, B. E., K. A. Coffey, M. A. Cohn, L. I. Catalino, T. Vacharkulksemsuk, S. B. Algoe, M. Brantley, and B. L. Fredrickson. “How Positive Emotions Build Physical Health: Perceived Positive Social Connections Account for the Upward Spiral Between Positive Emotions and Vagal Tone.” Psychological Science 24, no. 7 (2013): 1123-1132.

“The Noun Project.” The Noun Project. Accessed May 15, 2014.

http://thenounproject.com/.

O’Neil, Brittney. “Mirror, Mirror on the Screen, What Does All this ASCII Mean?: A Pilot Study of Spontaneous Facial Mirroring of Emotions.” Arbutus Reveiw 4, no. No 1 (2013): 19-43.

Shlain, Leonard. The alphabet versus the goddess: the conflict between word and image. New York: Viking, 1998. Kindle Edition.

Thorhauge , Stine . “The Demographics of Twitter Users [Study] | Mindjumpers.” Mindjumpers RSS. https://www.mindjumpers.com/blog/2012/08/demographic-of-twitter (accessed April 8, 2014).

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“Why You Should [THUMBS UP] the Emerging Emoji Art Movement.” Why You

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