Tag: books

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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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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! 🙏 👁〰💻❗