Blog Post #2: Do Emojis Count as a Language? ~OR~ We, the 👮‍♀️👷‍♂️👨‍⚖️👩‍🏭👩‍🔬👨‍🌾 of the United States of America…

Posted on February 28, 2019 by Micah Taylor

After reading Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground: From Point to Point, a novel composed entirely of emojis, a question must be raised: Do emojis communicate ideas well enough to be considered a language? In order to answer this question, we have to first examine what the purpose of language is.

A written language only exists so that ideas can be spread more effectively, and have a sense of permanence in the world. Anything written on paper has the same amount of permanence as English does written on paper, so emojis have that box ticked.

Now, do written down emojis spread ideas (and by ideas I mean stories, thoughts, emotions, knowledge, or anything else you might write down) effectively? I think that yes, emojis do convey ideas as well as any other language, emojis are just a language that is more new and less well known than most others. There are no rules of grammar or structure that this language has yet, and I would argue that it actually doesn’t even need those. Regardless emojis were made to be an optical form of communication (that is, read instead of heard), and they can express ideas effectively, so I think emojis are an effective form of language.

From very early in Bing’s Book from the Ground, there are passages that illustrate how well emojis can communicate ideas.

Excerpt from page 4 of Xu Bing’s *Book from the Ground: From Point to Point*.

The above passage, on page 4 of Bing’s book, tells us that the main character opened his door, and at his door was a delivery guy who brought him a package. The main character opens the package and finds it is a book that he, presumably, ordered. He begins to read it while drinking his coffee. He gets carried away with the book, loses track of time, and then smells his breakfast burning, so he has to throw it out, but he is still hungry.

These events are all portrayed pretty clearly, and they are all events that we, if we live in the middle class in a first world country, have all experienced. Now, the aspect that sets emojis apart from other languages, is that there is room for you to insert your own imagination into the story. Because there are no rules for the language of emojis, there are certain parts of the story that are left undefined that you, as a reader, are able to expand upon.

For example, you could choose what book he is reading, or you could forget about that detail, and just accept that he is reading a book. You can imagine the conversation and interaction the main character had with the delivery guy. Was the delivery guy polite? Simply neutral? It’s up to you, and you don’t even have to stop to fill in those gaps, you do it automatically while reading and creating the story in your own head.

At least, that’s my theory. That is definitely how it worked for me. One section in which I felt I was able to create some of the emotion and tone behind the narrative was the portion near the end of the above passage. It explained that he was reading and drinking his coffee, and everything was nice and relaxed… AND SUDDENLY HE HAD TO RUSH TO TAKE CARE OF HIS BURNING FOOD. I have been dragged into a story and lost track of time very frequently, so instead of reading an author’s description of how the main character felt, I was able to reimagine my emotions and the feeling of being in that moment. Because of sections throughout the book, I felt that the emojis made Book from the Ground a more immersive book than some others written in English.

There is, of course, an obvious argument to this theory. The argument that, if there are things in the writing left up to interpretation, won’t some of the meaning become lost? Or won’t it be hard to explain exactly what you mean? I definitely agree with this argument, in that the fluidity of meaning from emojis renders them almost useless in certain cases. Emojis would not be effective when, say, writing a constitution for a new country that all sense of justice will be based on in the future. You will need a language more adept at detail than emojis for that (besides, who’s going to take your country seriously if you write your constitution in emojis?).

Photo of George Washington after the Declaration of Independence was signed, 1776; *Colorized*.

However, when writing a story, whether fictional or real, emojis are able to immerse the reader and convey feelings in a way that many languages often can not. Also, when writing a story in emojis, if there is something that you want to make 100% sure come across the same to all your readers, you are able to specify your meaning with the large number of options available to you, or even by creating your own emoji! Bring out your inner artist.

So, in conclusion don’t write important historical documents in emojis. But definitely do take a risk, and experiment writing an immersive and relatable story in emojis! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on emojis and language.

Digital Lab Assignment #7: Twitter Bots ~OR~ Are Xanax and Pizza Relatable?

Posted on February 24, 2019February 28, 2019 by Micah Taylor

More Twitter Literature (Twitterature! Can I get a patent on that?) coming your way.

Ah, bad news folks. I looked it up, and apparently “Twitterature” is already a thing. #borninthewrongera

Anyway, so, this week I made a Twitter bot (that’s not illegal right?)! Here is the link to the bot’s account if you’re interested. It was actually pretty fun! Essentially, you create word banks full of words or phrases, and then give the bot options (called ‘origins’) on how to organize those words and phrases. It is written in JSON code, here is a copy of the code I used (it’s a bit long, you definitely don’t have to read the whole thing, but this will give you an idea of how the Twitter bot works).

{
“origin”: [
“#pronoun# #verb# #reason#, and #then# #outcome#”,
“#action# in #place# #seems# #adjective#”
],
“pronoun”: [
“I”,
“My dogs”,
“The voices in my head”,
“My parents”,
“The father, the son, and the holy ghost”
],
“verb”: [
“died because of”,
“found”,
“took all the drugs and thought they were”,
“fervently worship”
],
“reason”: [
“John Cena”,
“penguins”,
“a clock”,
“the internet”,
“the browser ‘firefox'”,
“pizza”
],
“then”: [
“that’s why”,
“then I discovered”,
“now I feel like”
],
“outcome”: [
“I can’t be sincere.”,
“I was asleep.”,
“I was late for work.”,
“the world is going to end.”,
“depression is a thing.”
],
“action”: [
“Crying”,
“Taking Xanax”,
“Filming an X-rated movie”,
“Making out”,
“Ordering pizza”,
“Being stoned”,
“Eating alone”,
“Dying”
],
“place”: [
“the White House”,
“public”,
“space”,
“a factory that processes peanuts”,
“a bar”,
“7-11”,
“my kitchen”,
“my cubicle”
],
“seems”: [
“seems”,
“sounds”,
“is”,
“was”,
“might be”
],
“adjective”: [
“fun.”,
“impossible.”,
“a little sad.”,
“actually kind of enlightening.”,
“addicting.”,
“arousing.”
]
}

Using this code, I set the tweets to post randomly every half hour so I could get some examples, such as:

In writing the codes for my Twitter bot, I chose sentence structures that were common in Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin’s Selected Tweets (which we have been studying). For example, “[pronoun] [did something], and [that’s why something else].” seemed to be a frequent structure. As well as “[doing something] in [a place] [was/is] [adjective].” So, my two origins were based on these structures.

Examples of each structure. The bot randomly chooses from each of the origins (structures).

I also used words and phrases to fill my word banks that were frequent in Gonzalez and Lin’s tweets. I chose to do this because the nature of the two poets tweets are very random, and have ridiculous premises. Obviously, people tweet things like that though, so a bot that spouts out similar tweets wouldn’t be absolutely ridiculous (well, I suppose that’s debatable).

In doing this project, I wasn’t necessarily trying to create a bot that would create literary valuable tweets, but I was trying to create one that was more relatable than your average bot. Also, I aimed to create tweets that played off of the random nature of a twitter bot. I think I succeeded in this goal, most of the tweets made sense, and could have been posted by a real person. Also, I think they were some pretty entertaining tweets!

Comparing this form of literature with the previous twitter literature I created, I would definitely say that creating a “twitter story” is more literary valuable. Creating a Twitter story gives you so much more freedom and variables you can play with. Using a twitter bot, you would not really be able to create a coherent story across multiple tweets, because it is just so random. You could definitely use a Twitter bot to create multiple short stories in singular tweets. The more words you have in your word banks, the more stories it would create, but each story would be limited to a separate tweet. So, I believe that you can definitely create more valuable literature on Twitter without a bot.

That being said, I do not think that bots take away the humanity of writing tweets. You are still required to write all the code, phrases, word banks, and structures yourself. There is still quite a bit of creativeness and detail that has to go into creating the code for these bots. It is certainly a form of literature, although it has more limitations than “traditional” literature. I would also argue that this form of literature doesn’t “mass produce” content, At least, not any more than content is already mass produced on Twitter.

Creating a twitter bot was a very interesting experience, and I think it would be a lot of fun to keep expanding on my structures and word banks. Although, before I do that, I would really like to create some more twitter stories! I think there are so many fun options, using multiple accounts, and/or retweets, and/or other aspects that twitter can offer.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed!

Digital Lab Assignment #6: Twitter Stories! ~OR~ I’ve Read it Both Ways

Posted on February 17, 2019February 28, 2019 by Micah Taylor

Ah, Twitter. The ultimate collection of hysterical celebrities, illiterate masses, and random clutter posts that have no apparent meaning or value. Of course, Twitter does have contributions to offer to the world; quick news flashes, a good platform for bouncing ideas off of like minded people, and some would even say a good source of memes.

However, most people, from what I have observed, do not expect anything of specific literary value to come from Twitter. This isn’t necessarily surprising, I mean, each tweet can only be 280 characters long. However, some people, like Tao Lin, believe that tweets have an inherent literary nature.

Selected Tweets; a faux leather, embossed novel filled with tweets from these two poets.

Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez picked some of their tweets to publish in physical book form. But they didn’t stop there, they decided the cover should be faux leather, and that it should be silver and gold embossed. This book is very entertaining, but the important part is that it raises the question of the literary potential of Twitter. Despite Twitter’s limitations and quirks, can I also create something of literary value? I attempted to and, if I do say so myself, I believe I succeeded.

@ME after I finished my Twitter story. Except #noskimmilk

So, the point of this post is to talk about my story. You can read it on Twitter here. Or here. Or click here if you want. All the links lead to the same place. I just really think you should read it.

There were a couple options for writing my Twitter story, either writing one story that took place over multiple tweets, or writing multiple short stories that each had their own tweet. I chose to write a story that took place over multiple tweets, and then add another twist on top of that. I realized that if I wanted to make my story coherent, I would have to post each tweet backwards, so that when you are scrolling from the top down, it reads like a normal story. Then, I thought, “What if I wrote my story so that it could be read either way the user scrolled?” So, I attempted to write a story that was broken up into little segments, and could be read forwards and backwards.

Personally, I think my attempt was successful! I really like this piece of literature because I have never written, or seen, a story that can be read backwards and forwards (I wouldn’t be surprised if one already exists, but I haven’t read any). Interestingly enough, the restrictions and specifications of the Twitter platform, in my opinion, enhanced my story. Each tweet has its own separate box, so I didn’t have to worry about my readers accidentally combining portions of the story in their head, or skipping over parts while scrolling back up. The scrolling aspect of Twitter also helps my story, because scrolling back up the posts in a profile is much easier than flipping through a book backwards. I also appreciated the fact that each section of the story had to be 280 characters or less, it created a fun challenge for me!

If one were to accept the “Twitter story” as a genre, I believe that this genre does have literary value. Because of the unique platform Twitter has, it opens up new veins for creative aspects in stories, as you can see through my story. There are so many more options to be explored through this medium with writing stories. Using retweets and comments and such, you could essentially create a living dialogue in your story, for example. There are so many possibilities! I think the Twitter story is also valuable because people are spending increasing portions of their days on social media. In order for authors to continue spreading their works and ideas, they can post stories, or teasers to their stories, on twitter to try and reach a large audience. There is definitely a large market on Twitter, and it would be foolish to not take advantage of that.

I hope you enjoyed my story, and this blog post! Thank you for reading!

Posted on February 10, 2019February 28, 2019 by Micah Taylor

Digital Lab #5: Tell Us in Your Own Words ~OR~ Here I Go Again

Once again into the fray with emoji’s (See Lost in Translation)! This time, I created my own story in emojis, and it was much harder than I expected it to be!

Emoji Story Download

For some reason, I thought we were supposed to make a poem of some sort, and I had a song stuck in my head, so I attempted to base my story off of a song or two (comment below if you can tell which songs!). Based on my knowledge of the songs, I attempted to create a story that tied the two together. Because of the small amount of emojis I had, and the difficulty of writing with them, I think that this project was more limiting than simply translating a chapter from Xu Bing’s Book From the Ground. The most frustrating thing, though, was that all the emojis changed (and some didn’t show up at all!) after I shared it with my project partner on Google Docs. It looked just how I wanted it to before I shared it, and then everything changed when the fire nation attacked.

Fortunately, my partner was awesome and was still able to make sense of my story and translate it!

Emoji Story Translation Download

Somehow, he translated my terrible emoji storytelling skills into a story that was pretty accurate to what I was getting at. He did think that my character traveled to France, when the flag I used was actually a Russian flag (that is what the “RU” means on the document above). But the fact that my character traveled came across still, which is the important part. The translation was also skewed because I was not able to differentiate between different characters of the same gender very easily in emojis. For this reason, he thought that I meant to say “I don’t feel lucky to be in France” but what I meant to say was “[Another person] doesn’t know how lucky he is to be in Russia.” I bring this up because I used the same set of emojis to say this multiple times.

France’s flag (left) and Russia’s flag (right). ‘A’ for color scheme, ‘F’ for originality.

My partner did also understand my transition segment. While in Russia (or France), my character went to the beach with a woman, but it began to storm. He got that right. Then he inferred that my character instead took his date to a restaurant called the “Octopus House.” Which is a cool name if you ask me. However, what I had intended was for my characters to dive into the ocean and then find a literal octopus’s house where they hung out.

(Sidenote: Does anyone know if octopuses live in homes? Or do they just roam around? I think it would be cute if they had little nests or something.)

The story still has a happy ending though! My partner translated that when the storm was over, my character and his date fell in love. Which is what I intended to happen in my story. Yay! Go character!

Reading the translation of the story, I really appreciated my partner’s creative liberties with expounding upon certain aspects of the story. I also really enjoyed his word choices in his translation, they made the story feel relatable and authentic, in my opinion.

Overall, my interpretation of “Literature by the Numbers” has not changed much since my last post. But it was still fun to play around with emojis, and it was interesting to see how my partner translated my story!

Thanks for reading!

Digital Lab Assignment #4: Lost in Translation ~or~ 📖😀😊😶🤔&🚫🔠〰🎥🎬❓

Posted on February 3, 2019March 25, 2019 by Micah Taylor

👋❗ 🙏🔎💻❗

👁〰📖📅. 📖〰🌄➡📘. ✍〰😃😛😮🙁😬😉❗ 🚫🔠 ❗

😁👍✔. 👤😵❓ 👌.

Imagine reading a whole book that is only written like that! Some people shudder at the idea of struggling through a novel with only emojis, but others are intrigued at the idea. The book I am referring to is Xu Bing’s Book From the Ground: From Point to Point. Bing is a visual (and sometimes linguistic) artist that wrote about the life of an average office worker, using only emojis. Bing wanted to create a novel that anyone could read, regardless of what language they spoke. He created it partially as an antithesis to his work Book From the Sky, which is equally as fascinating, but nearly impossible for most people to read.

Picture of an installation of Xu Bing’s Book From the Sky at the Blanton Museum of Art

In our Literature by the Numbers class, we discussed the implications of using this as a language. Does it count as a language? Does it replace language? If so, is that a bad thing? Or a natural evolution of language? These are definitely interesting topics of discussion, but not what this post is about. In order to examine the relationship Book From the Ground has with language, each person in our class translated a chapter from the book into a form of their choosing. I was assigned to the first chapter, and I decided to turn it into a script for a screenplay.

Excerpt from the first chapter of Xu Bing’s Book From the Ground.

I’m sure that I made lot’s of technical errors in the actual forms and whatnot of screenplays, but it was definitely fun to try!

My translation of Xu Bing’s Book From the Ground Download

We also got paired up with a partner who translated the same chapter, but in a different way. This led to some interesting discoveries about the differences between interpretations of the same chapter, and the successes and shortcomings of emojis as a language.

My partner’s translation of Book From the Ground Download

As you can see, my translation is much different than my partners translation, but it got across the same story. While I was writing my translation, the ambiguous nature of the language actually helped me to write my screenplay. There was a lot of freedom about the specifics of the story, so I took some creative liberties while writing the screenplay. The way I translated was also more in depth than other options, and it took more time than I thought it would. In the end though, it made me appreciate the possibilities that the vagueness of the emoji medium offered.

Comparing my translation to my partners, I thought it was interesting that we interpreted certain details into our translation that were not included in the book. For example, we both said that the main character’s cat walked on his face to wake him up, but that was not specified in Xu Bing’s book.

(I know this cat isn’t on the person’s face, but it’s really cute)

My partner and I also both gave the main character and his cat specific characterizations. We gave them names, thoughts, and identities that were not included in the book. Similarly, we both were very in-depth with our translations. We had the option to just say “A bird was singing outside. A guy woke up and turned off his alarm clock. His cat came and woke him up…..”, but neither of us did. We were both compelled to tell a story, one that had intricacies and interesting details. I’m not sure if that says more about us, or more about the book we were translating, but it does show the need for humans to make explanations for what their brains are thinking.

Now, talking about these translations in the context of “literature by the numbers”… Although it is difficult to think of language in the term of numbers, emojis bring the relationship between language and numbers closer. Emojis are inherently digital, and although they are conveyed through an image, they are, at their core, a collection of ones and zeros. If we do accept emojis as a language, then they can be analyzed digitally more than most languages can. This shows that language itself can be quantified under the right circumstances.

This brings up the question; “So what?” Why would you want to quantify language? Well, my answer is that I, personally, don’t. Not right now. But later I might want to quantify a certain aspect of people’s communications with one another for an experiment, for example. For that reason, maybe I will try to use a language that has a closer relationship with numbers than English does. Like emojis, or some other form of language that happens to pop up. The possibilities, really, are endless.

If you are interested in the possibility of emojis being a language, or just intrigued about reading a book written entirely from emojis, check out Book From the Ground! It is a very entertaining read!

I hope you enjoyed this post! 🙏 👁〰💻❗