Outside of emoji researchers, lots of people still forecast disaster or dream of universal communication even if most of us are confident that neither is nigh. Despite our protests, emoji inspire visions of apocalypse and utopia. As with many linguistic resources (sounds, words, syntax), people use emoji to grind all sorts of axes. For example, people who say that women use more emoji than men are usually making some point that the data don't support. The first step in such an analysis is to ignore or discount the fact that, say, Snoop Dogg and Kyle MacLachlan are among the biggest emoji users in the world. In this talk, I'll demonstrate how ideologies of emoji work themselves out across 870 journalists that political scientists have separately scored as liberal, conservative, or centrist. This lets us compare objective vs. subjective stances and inverts the idea that gender explains emoji to show how it is that emoji are a way that people "do" gender differently based on their political commitments.

1. EMOJI ARE GREAT AND/OR THEY
WILL DESTROY THE WORLD
TYLER SCHNOEBELEN
(@TSCHNOEBELEN)

2. KEYNOTE FROM EMOJI2018, JUNE 25TH, 2018 AT STANFORD
HI, WELCOME TO THE WRITTEN VERSION OF THIS PRESENTATION
▸ Outside of emoji researchers, lots of people still forecast disaster or dream of
universal communication even if most of us are confident that neither is nigh.
Despite our protests, emoji inspire visions of apocalypse and utopia.
▸ As with many linguistic resources (sounds, words, syntax), people use emoji to
grind all sorts of axes. For example, people who say that women use more emoji
than men are usually making some point that the data don't support. The first step
in such an analysis is to ignore or discount the fact that, say, Snoop Dogg and Kyle
MacLachlan are among the biggest emoji users in the world.
▸ In this talk, I'll demonstrate how ideologies of emoji work themselves out across
870 journalists that political scientists have separately scored as liberal,
conservative, or centrist. This lets us compare objective vs. subjective stances and
inverts the idea that gender explains emoji to show how it is that emoji are a way
that people "do" gender differently based on their political commitments.

3. EMOJI ARE GREAT!
A BETTER WORLD THROUGH EMOJI!

4. EMOJI WILL DESTROY THE WORLD!
WELCOME TO THE EMOJIPOCALYPSE

5. “MISUNDERSTANDING IS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO LIVE AFTER BABEL” - SCHOR
VISUAL LANGUAGE IN SERVICE OF PERFECT CLARITY
▸ Francis Bacon: words can refer directly
to thought itself, ideograms are even
more powerful and require no
translation
▸ John Wilkins, the first secretary of the
Royal Society, proposed a new language
purely of ideas with 2,030 characters
▸ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said that we
should produce not organize
knowledge with a pictographic system,
a little like Egyptian hieroglyphs: an
incorruptible language of logic

6. 🤪

8. MOST SCRIPTS START OUT FOR ACCOUNTING OR ADMINISTRATION
EMOJI ARE OBVIOUSLY NOT FOR LOGIC, BUT…
▸ Here’s the basic order of
what you do when you get
a writing system:
▸ Commercial, legal,
contracts, some magical
and religious uses
▸ Chronicles and ritual
texts are later
▸ Instruction and
entertainment later still

9. IF YOU WANT TO READ A LOT ON THE NEUROSCIENCE OF EMOTIONS
UNDERLYING REASON, GO FOR ANTONIO DAMASIO’S “DESCARTES’ ERROR”
RESEARCH ON MISUNDERSTANDING, LOGIC, EMOTION
▸ Consider the present impossibility of emoji-as-a-language
given
▸ lack of non-repetitive emoji sequences
▸ e.g., Medlock & McCulloch (2016)
▸ inconsistencies of interpretation
▸ e.g., Miller et al (2017)

10. OH PARADISE
EMOJI ARE, OF COURSE NOT A LANGUAGE OF IDEAS
▸ Most of us think of them as adding in nonverbal conversational cues that happen
in speech but are absent in text
▸ e.g., Tigwell & Flatla (2016), Pavalanathan & Eisenstein (2015), Steinmetz &
Schnoebelen (2014)
▸ Cramer et al (2016)'s analysis of what emoji are up to include:
▸ Adding emotional/situational meaning
▸ Adjusting tone
▸ Making a message more engaging
▸ Conversation management
▸ Relationship management

11. STOP CHANGE STOP CHANGE STOP CHANGE STOP CHANGE
DOOMSDAY PRESCRIPTIVISTS ARE “CONSERVATIVE”…TO A POINT
Ps—“Literally” has been used as a figurative intensifier since the 1760s

12. STOP CHANGE STOP CHANGE STOP CHANGE STOP CHANGE
DOOMSDAY PRESCRIPTIVISTS ARE “CONSERVATIVE”…TO A POINT

13. FROM PULLUM’S “IDEOLOGY, POWER, AND LINGUISTIC THEORY”
THE JUSTIFICATIONS AND FEARS BEHIND RULES ON LANGUAGE USE

14. 🔌

15. IDEOLOGY!
There are no “collections of
facts” free from the
assumptions we make
about the world

16. ROXANE GAY FROM “EMOJI”, A 2013 ZINE
REPRESENTATION

17. A LOT OF SKIN TONE MODIFIERS BECAME AVAILABLE ~APRIL 2015
THE FIRST BLACK SANTA AT THE MALL OF AMERICA WAS DEC 2016

18. MICROSOFT TRIED TO REMEDY “SINGLE SKIN TONE” ~2016
SO MANY FAMILY TYPES…BUT THEY HAVE TO HAVE THE SAME SKIN TONES

19. FROM THE TV SHOW “GIRLS”
REPRODUCTION

20. A BIT MORE DEFINITION
WHAT AN IDEOLOGY IS
▸ Ideologies aren’t really epistemic (about knowledge), they are political
▸ Ideologies exist to confirm certain viewpoints
▸ Serve the interests of certain people
▸ Perform functional roles in social/economic/political/legal
institutions
▸ Ideology is “an action-oriented system of beliefs” (Daniel Bell)
▸ The goal isn’t actually to render reality transparent
▸ But to motivate people to do or not do certain things

21. FROM THE NOW CORPUS (NEWS ON THE WEB: ~6 BIL WORDS SINCE 2010)

22. FOUR RECENT EMOJI DEBATES
WHO GETS REPRESENTED? WHO DOESN’T COUNT? (…IDEOLOGY)

23. SEE ALSO BAMMAN ET AL (2014) “GENDER IDENTITY AND LEXICAL
VARIATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA”
THE MOST COMMON DISTINCTIONS AROUND GENDER AND LANGUAGE
▸ Men use informative language
▸ Prepositions (to), attributive adjectives (fat), higher word
lengths (gargantuan)
▸ Women use involved language
▸ First and second person pronouns (you), present tense
verbs (goes), contractions (don’t)
▸ (Argamon, Koppel, Fine, & Shimoni, 2003; Herring & Paolillo, 2006b; Schler, Koppel, Argamon, &
Pennebaker, 2006…they are working off of dimensions in Biber 1995 and Chafe 1982)

24. RIGHT. THESE GUYS AREN’T “INVOLVED”

25. SEE ALSO BAMMAN ET AL (2014) “GENDER IDENTITY AND LEXICAL
VARIATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA”
OR “CONTEXTUALITY”
▸ Men are formal and explicit
▸ Nouns (floor), adjectives (big), prepositions (to), articles (the)
▸ Women are deictic and contextual
▸ Pronouns (you), verbs (run), adverbs (happily), interjections (oh!)
▸ “Contextuality” decreases when an unambiguous understanding
is more important or difficult—when people are physically or
socially farther away
▸ (Mukherjee & Liu, 2010; Nowson, Oberlander, & Gill, 2005 building off of Heylighen and Dewaele 2002)

26. CHECK OUT “LANGUAGE AND GENDER” BY ECKERT & MCCONNELL-GINET
IN MANY LINGUISTIC STUDIES, IT’S WOMEN WHO USE THE STANDARD VARIABLES
▸ Here are the kinds of explanations offered for why they
don’t do as much dialect stuff
▸ Did they do it for prestige (to acquire social capital)?
▸ To avoid losing status?
▸ Are women actually creating norms, not following them?

27. At its most basic

28. “HUGS AND KISSES”
XO
▸ A lot more women use xo than men
▸ 11% of all women
▸ 2.5% of all men
▸ But that means that 89% of women aren’t using it at all.
▸ People who use xo are three times more likely to use
ttyl (‘talk to you later’)
▸ The style is more commonly adopted by women
▸ But there’s other stuff going on here: age, job, etc.
▸ It’s not clear that gender is even the most
important, it’s just that we’re starting with gender-
colored glasses

29. CHEN ET AL (2017) “THROUGH A GENDER LENS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF
EMOJI USAGE OVER LARGE-SCALE ANDROID USERS”
134,419 USERS FROM 183 COUNTRIES; 401M MESSAGES
▸ The pattern of “women use more emoji than men” holds,
but not everywhere (e.g., not in WhatsApp)

30. SO WHO USES THE
MOST EMOJI?

32. ❌ $%

33. $&
$'http://bit.ly/CherEmoji

34. CORPUS BASICS
POLITICAL JOURNALISTS
▸ 873 political journalists identified as left/right/centrist
▸ StatSocial (2015)
▸ 549 men, 234 women
▸ 257 left, 271 right, 255 center
▸ (roughly 70% men and 30% women for each)

36. FIRST THE CONFIRMATION OF GENDER-COLORED GLASSES

37. NOW SOME MORE NUANCING

38. IDEOLOGIES OF SELF-EXPRESSION
AVERAGE EMOJI PER MILLION WORDS
Women Men Ratio
Center 2,179 899 2.4
Right 3,799 837 4.5
Left 3,364 1,912 1.8

39. IDEOLOGIES OF SELF-EXPRESSION
AVERAGE EMOJI PER MILLION WORDS
Women Men Ratio
Center 2,179 899 2.4
Right 3,799 837 4.5
Left 3,364 1,912 1.8
Celebrities 30,816 30,487 1.0

40. 🤔 IS USED BY 190 OF THE 873 JOURNALISTS; 361 /873 JOURNALISTS DIDN’T
USE ANY EMOJI (FOCUSING ON JAN 2017-APR 2018)
GETTING A FEEL FOR THE CORPUS
▸ Top emoji across the whole corpus, raw counts
▸ 😂🤔🔥😳😍😀🙄👏👇1
▸ Top emoji by number of journalists who use it at least once
▸ 🤔🔥😂❤1😉👍👀👏🎉
▸ Top emoji by average words per million
▸ 💙😂😍📞9💛😀🙌😳😊

41. DOWN AND ACROSS: LEFT, LEFT, RIGHT, CONS
FOCUS ON HIGH TF-IDF EMOJI PER AUTHORS

42. DOWN AND ACROSS: LEFT, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT
FOCUS ON HIGH TF-IDF EMOJI PER AUTHORS

44. LANGUAGE CHANGE INCREASES THE RESOURCES WE HAVE AVAILABLE
PEOPLE ARE GREAT AT ADAPTING THINGS
▸ As long as people use language,
language will change over time
▸ Not everyone has access to all the
same resources—linguistically or
materially
▸ People are structured by big social
forces and technologies (structure)
▸ But they also create and adapt
those structures (agency)

45. gɪrma kowaji-k ati-e
Girma ball-ACC kick-PAST
"Girma kicked the ball '
gɪrma-k kowaji-k a< ʃe
Girma-ACC ball-ACC kick MAL
‘Girma kicked the ball (although someone else
wanted it) '
Malefactives

46. A DETERMINER IS SOMETHING LIKE ENGLISH “THE”
TONGAN
▸ Different determiners express
sympathy to their nouns (Hendrick,
2005)
▸ si’i and si’a

47. Czech
Diphthongs
Prague-like, can
also intensify
affection
Or pejoration

48. SICOLI (2009)
ZAPOTEC
▸ Voice quality
▸ Falsetto: Respect to godparents,
God
▸ Whisper: Important messages
▸ Breathy: Scolding, demanding
▸ Creaky: Commiserating

49. XORU IS BASICALLY “I, RUPAUL, SEND YOU HUGS AND KISSES”); DRUMPF
COMES FROM TRUMP’S FAMILY NAME BEFORE AMERICA
NON-STANDARD SPELLING, EXPRESSIVE LENGTHENING

50. OLD SCHOOL EMOJI
EMOTICONS

51. SCHNOEBELEN (2012)
FROM EMOTICON RESEARCH
▸ Valence (positive, negative)
▸ Immediacy (I’m sad vs. then they took it away #sadface)
▸ Flirting
▸ Teasing

52. USE THE RESOURCES YOU HAVE HANDY
PUNCTUATION: PERIODS, EXCLAMATIONS, QUESTIONS, ELLIPSES

54. TEXT
WHAT IF INSTEAD OF DIVIDING BY GENDER FIRST WE ACTUALLY WENT AFTER “POLITICS”
▸ Calculate *trump* per million words for each person
▸ Median: 7,811 pow (IQR: 3,220 to 14,854 pmw)
▸ Make three groups: top quartile, bottom quartile,
everyone in the middle
▸ Re-examine emoji usage

55. A PROXY SCALE FOR HOW POLITICAL THESE POLITICAL JOURNALISTS ARE
AVERAGE EMOJI PER MILLION WORDS
Women Men Ratio
Least Trump 5,675 2,180 2.6
Middle 2,524 949 2.7
Talk most
about Trump
1,274 777 1.6

56. GO FOR EXCEPTIONS!
HIGH TRUMP USER WHO ALMOST NEVER USES EMOJI

57. ALTERNATIVES
HOW TO AVOID “👇”

58. NON-EMOJI USER
HOW TO HAVE REACTIONS THAT DON’T INVOLVE ROUND FACES

59. NON-EMOJI USER
HOW TO HAVE REACTIONS THAT DON’T INVOLVE ROUND FACES

60. “DR” VS. “MISS” VS. “BOY” VS. “ROBERT” VS. “BOBBY”
REFERENCE ITSELF IS A PLACE FOR SHOWING RESPECT, DISLIKE, ETC

61. WRAPPING UP
TOWARDS A CONCLUSION
▸ We can’t actually do our jobs or live our lives without
making distinctions
▸ We can recognize that distinctions have consequences
▸ We can practice more care and questioning in our cutting

62. TOWARDS A CONCLUSION
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO ATTEND TO IDEOLOGY?
▸ You’re still looking at phenomena, but you’re also looking at
what you choose to look at it, how you choose to look at it, and
how your analysis gets put to work
▸ In our case, we want to see how linguistic-symbolic meanings:
▸ Encode
▸ Produce
▸ Reproduce
▸ Relations of power and domination

63. SEE ALSO KATE CRAWFORD ON AI
WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN FOR US?
▸ Most of the people who build technology and do research
come from privileged backgrounds
▸ This makes it difficult for our imagination and empathy to
extend out to everyone our systems and analyses will affect
▸ The implication is that we need NOT ONLY to attend to issues
of diversity and representation
▸ AND to include educate communities who will be affected so
that they, too, can voice their goals and values

64. THANKS! 🖖

65. APPENDIX

67. 🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩
THIS MADE THE DONUT EMOJI TAKE ON POLITICAL MEANING

68. CHEN ET AL (2017) “THROUGH A GENDER LENS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF
EMOJI USAGE OVER LARGE-SCALE ANDROID USERS”
134,419 USERS FROM 183 COUNTRIES; 401M MESSAGES
▸ When you look at emoji differences more closely, you can almost always find
exceptions to “women use them more than men”, as in these tables where for
“Pattern 2 and 2.1”, you get men using more than women