DAVID MALAN: This is
CS50, and over the summer,
we have been holding a number of
these live sessions, some of them
office hours with myself,
with CS50's own Brian Yu,
and with some of our
past and present staff.
We've also tried offering a
number of topic-specific classes--
for instance, on security with me, on
artificial intelligence with Brian,
and today on emojis with a very
special friend of ours, Jennifer 8.
Lee, who'll be joining us
remotely via Zoom, as well.
But before we get to those emojis, allow
me to give you a bit of background.
If you've taken CS50x itself, or
CS50 on campus here or elsewhere,
you'll recall, perhaps,
that emojis aren't actually
all that dissimilar from other
characters we might type on the screen.
So on my screen here, you'll actually
see a screenshot from Instagram.
And by amazing coincidence,
one year ago today, I
happened to post these
two photographs that
were composited together by CS50's own
Cheng Gong, one of our former teaching
fellows.
And he made the very astute observation
that apparently for 20 years
have I been teaching in CS50 emojis,
or formally emoticons, in some form.
So on this screen here at the
very top is a picture of emoticons
that I drew with chalk
on a chalkboard in 1999
in the very first class I ever taught.
And on the bottom do
you have in Fall 2018
in CS50 the much more digital
version of these things.
And these are actually
even more than emojis.
These are Apple's Animojis
that actually come to life.
And so it would seem for 20 years
all we've been teaching is emojis.
But they're actually quite interesting.
And today, we'll understand how an
emoji ultimately becomes an emoji.
But what is an emoji itself, exactly?
Well, this, of course,
is the face with tears
of joy, a very smiling, happy face.
But does anyone know
exactly how this emoji
is implemented underneath the hood?
What is an emoji, if someone would
be comfortable raising a blue hand
via Zoom?
SPEAKER 2: All right.
DAVID MALAN: Kingsley, would you like
to answer what an emoji is for everyone?
STUDENT: Well, my own idea--
I think it's [? a social ?] [? thing. ?]
Emoji [INAUDIBLE] display of emotions.
[INAUDIBLE] images to express emotion.
DAVID MALAN: Really well said--
using images to express emotion.
And that's indeed the case.
And recall, if you've
taken CS50 already,
whether on campus or
online, underneath the hood
at the end of the day, as Kamal
says, these really are just bits.
In fact, that face with tears
of joy that simply happens
to be represented inside of
your Mac, your PC, your Android
phone, your iPhone, or any other device
these days really is just a number.
A decimal number, in fact--
128,514.
If you're familiar
from CS50 with binary,
or 0's and 1's, you might recall that
this pattern of 1's and 0's is exactly
the same thing as that number, 128,514.
So when you send an emoji or receive
an emoji in an email, or text,
or some other medium, really all
you're receiving is a number,
or really this sequence of 0's and 1's.
And equivalently, when you type
out one of these characters,
you're typing something called a
Unicode character, which we'll hear more
about today, which is simply a mapping
between those numbers and, as you say,
Kingsley, those images.
So if you think about a typical
keyboard-- for instance,
this one here is a standard
US English keyboard--
there's only a finite number of
keys, of course, on that keyboard.
There are fancy menus nowadays
that allow you to access things
like accented characters
and more, and whether you
have a Mac or a PC or
Android or iPhone, odds
are there's even an emoji menu these
days that allows you to point and click
at one of these emojis.
But really, if we had hundreds
of more keys on our keyboard,
that's all an emoji would be.
It's indeed an emotion
that's depicted in an image.
It's indeed a mapping between
an image and a number.
But it really is just
a keystroke of sorts
that these days appears in the menu
only because there's so many of them.
Now, I'm so pleased that
today, we'll be joined
by a good friend of mine and a classmate
from Harvard, a well-known reporter
and producer, writer,
and so many other things.
But today's focus, of
course, is on emojis.
And Jennifer 8.
Lee, who's with us here today, is
one of the founders of Emojination.
And Jenny, more so than really anyone
who's ever talked to me about emojis,
really got me thinking about them a
lot more thoughtfully, so to speak.
Some years ago, I rather kept waving
my hand or even rolling my eyes,
not unlike the emoji, at
the proliferation of emojis
and how they were starting to
dominate our text messages and emails.
But really, as we'll learn today,
there's so much more to them.
They do convey emotion.
They do allow different
cultures and people
to represent information in their
own spoken or written languages.
And there's so much
more than to Unicode,
and in turn, this one
form of them, emojis.
So without further ado, my dear
friend and very well-known Jennifer 8.
Lee.
JENNIFER LEE: Hi, I'm Jenny.
I actually took CS50 as a
freshman many, many years ago.
And one of the things I do,
actually, is I help regulate emojis.
So I'm going to talk a little
bit about how I do that.
And I'm going to explain how an
emoji becomes an emoji by sharing
my screen, which hopefully will work.
This is one of my most fun
lectures, which is evangelizing
about emoji around the world.
And one of the first
questions that I have is there
are some very, very strange
emoji on the keyboard.
And it's always a little bit
mysterious what they are.
So at the end of this,
you guys can vote,
and I will tell you what some
of the most strange emoji that
are on your keyboard are,
and you can do a poll.
It's such an interesting--
there's a lot going on
in the emoji keyboard.
And sometimes, I even have to
Google what some of these emoji are.
But I find that it's fun just
to dig around with the emoji
and figure out where they come from.
Wow, that was the last one-- the
last yellow squiggly one was actually
one I just added randomly.
Because I actually did not even
know, necessarily, what it was.
I think that's the one that will win.
All right, that sounds cool.
I will just keep on going.
So all of this started when I was--
my tumble-down the rabbit
hole of emojis started
when I was friends with my
designer name Yiying Lu,
who is actually very famous for
designing the Twitter Fail Whale.
So one day, we were texting
each other about dumplings,
because that's what we do, because
we're both Chinese-ish women.
And she was super excited.
And she was like, yum, yum,
yum, yum, yum, and then, knife
and fork, knife and fork.
And then, she halted, and was
like, I'm surprised that Apple
doesn't have a dumpling emoji.
And I was like, oh, that's
a really good point.
And then, half an hour later, suddenly
this little picture of an emoji--
a little dumpling with heart
eyes-- popped up on my screen.
And I was like, oh, did you make that?
And she's like, yeah.
And I was actually puzzled how there
could be no dumpling emoji, right?
Because in some ways,
dumplings are a universal food.
And there are lots of Japanese
foods on the emoji keyboard.
And since emoji originally came from
Japan, you see things like ramen,
and bento boxes, and curry, and tempura.
You even see obscure Japanese
foods, like the [INAUDIBLE]----
the things on a stick--
swirly things, which is
a fish cake, and even
what I would call a triangle
rice ball with a bikini wax.
But there was no dumpling.
And so I was really puzzled.
I was like, how could
there be no dumpling emoji?
Because dumplings are a universal food.
There's ravioli, and
khinkalli, and momos.
And at the same time,
emoji were universal.
So it told me that
the system was broken.
And I decided I was going to
go fight for a dumpling emoji.
And so I started googling
who controls emoji.
And I discovered this organization
called the Unicode Consortium.
And Unicode, I discovered, was a
non-profit organization in Mountain
View, California, that only has--
it had, like, 12 full
voting members at that time.
So this is 2015.
It's Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe,
Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo.
And of the non-US
multinational tech companies,
you had a German company
called SAP, a Chinese company
called Huawei, and then
the government of Oman.
So these were the folks who paid
$18,000 a year to have full voting power
and regulate emoji.
And I just felt a little
indignant about that,
that it was mostly tech companies that
were regulating this product that we
use on a human day-to-day basis.
But there was a loophole,
which is for $75,
you can join as a non-voting
member of Unicode, which
means that you can go to
their meetings, and you
can sign up on their email list,
but you don't have voting authority.
So that's what I did.
I signed up, and then the next time
they had a meeting, I took a bus
and showed up at Apple.
And I showed up in a room, and this
is basically who controls emoji.
I was surprised, in
part because I thought
it would be maybe a larger group
of people, maybe a little bit more
diverse.
These are the kinds of people at that
point who were emoji decision-makers.
They were older, whiter, male engineers.
There was one who even
had a t-shirt that
said "Shadowy Emoji Overlord," who is
the president of Unicode, Mark Davis.
So I decided that I didn't want the
decisions being made by large US tech
companies, and especially
not a demographic that
wasn't representative of the world.
So we created a group
called Emojination,
whose motto is to basically
fight for emoji to be
more representative and inclusive.
And so we did a big
dumpling emoji campaign,
and we lobbied in terms of making
a case for the dumpling emoji.
And our motto for Emojination was,
at that point, "Emoji by the people,
for the people."
So we submitted an
emoji proposal in 2016.
And it was great.
Within a couple of months, we
actually got the dumpling passed.
And there is Yiying with actually, at
that point, the co-chair of the Unicode
Emoji Subcommittee.
So not only did we get dumpling, but
we got takeout box, fortune cookies,
and chopsticks, as well.
And now, these are the ones that
show up in your keyboard in Apple.
So I'm curious from people what
emoji you think are missing.
Because I will tell you how to get your
ideas through the entire emoji process,
if that makes sense.
It's very rare that I get a population
that is representative of the world.
And since a lot of the
decision-makers skew American--
even if they're from
Iran or India originally,
they skew with an American sensibility.
So I will literally take
your answers and show them
to the rest of the emoji
decision-makers making a case,
especially for parts of the world
where foods aren't well represented--
so Middle East, Latin America, India.
DAVID MALAN: So now is your chance to
contribute to the next round of emojis.
And here, thanks to Brian, we
have a word cloud depicting
everyone's answers in real time.
JENNIFER LEE: Boba.
So good news for the boba people--
that should be coming this year.
So it's arriving on your phones--
it's already on Twitter web.
If you're on the web, you can find it.
Dosa has been one we've
been trying to push through.
It is hard.
And there are many people
making biryani as a case.
Golf-- there are already quite a bit.
Dragonfruit-- that's interesting.
[INAUDIBLE], that's a tricky one.
[INAUDIBLE]
All right, that is good
and representative.
So the way an emoji--
it's actually very
complicated, somewhat,
in terms of how an
emoji becomes an emoji.
And I'll walk you through it.
So one of the first things
that needs to happen
is someone out there
has an idea, and they
write a proposal that then gets
submitted to the Unicode Emoji
Subcommittee.
So it's a group full of people from
Apple Facebook, Google, Microsoft,
some other companies.
Now, Emojination has fought our
way onto the Emoji Subcommittee.
And then, there'll be questions,
and they'll return to the person.
And they often have to go
through a couple cycles
in terms of getting a
more rigorous proposal.
So when it gets out of Emoji
Subcommittee, it gets passed on.
But things that we think about
within the Emoji Subcommittee
are things like is it something that
is popularly demanded or frequently
requested, does it have multiple usages
and meanings-- so a fox is both a fox,
but it can also mean clever, right?
Or elephant can also mean big.
And another key thing, if you're dealing
with an emoji of that small size,
is is it visually distinct, and
can be recognized at a small size?
And then, something
else that we care about
is whether or not it's filling
a gap of existing emoji.
So is it something that can't
already be expressed by emoji?
So the kinds of things
that go against inclusion
include it's too narrow
or too specific--
so sometimes, it's a very specific
food or a very specific animal,
like a breed of dog or breed of cat.
If it's redundant, in terms of
something that's already covered--
so one year, a turkey company
wanted to do a roast turkey,
but we already had a live turkey.
So it didn't seem like
that was adding too much.
Now, another thing is
at small emoji sizes,
you can't really tell what it is.
This has been a blocker for kimchi,
which is a Korean side dish.
And this one's really big, actually.
Because Unicode is
universal and neutral,
you can't have anything
that has IP around it.
So no logos, brands, deities--
for some reason, they
don't like deities--
and no celebrities.
So when you hear about Kimoji, those are
actually not really emoji as regulated
by Unicode.
They're just stickers, essentially.
So once it gets out of
the subcommittee, it
goes to the full Unicode Technical
Committee, where about four times
a year, it votes on productive
and potential emoji.
And then, once a year,
it actually approves
an entire slate of
emoji that will arrive
the next year on computers and phones.
And then, it gets sent off
once the list is completed.
And it takes a while-- many, many
months-- for Apple and Google
and Microsoft to add
it to all the devices.
And then, tah-dah-- finally, at the
end, it arrives on your devices.
And so I would say on average, from
when you propose an emoji to when
it actually shows up on your phone,
it's anywhere between 18 and 24 months.
And so we created this group that
I mentioned called Emojination.
And we are a very diverse group.
And we help people go
through that process.
So one question is, why
does Unicode control emoji?
It's not obvious why a large
nonprofit in California
is regulating a global visual language.
Part of it has to do
with the fact that emoji
started in Japan back in the late '90s.
There was an original set that became
popularized by a company called Docomo.
In fact, it's so important
that it was collected
by the Museum of Modern Art
in New York City as part
of a permanent contribution
to design history.
And what happened was
in 2007, there were
a lot of proliferation of companies
that were using emoji in Japan.
But big American companies,
like Google and Apple,
wanted to start selling their devices
and start using Gmail in Japan.
And in order to do that,
they needed to have emoji,
because Japanese people would
be incredibly upset if they
couldn't have their emoji through
their other communication devices.
So a group of companies came to
Unicode in 2007 and said, help.
And what was so interesting
was they needed to unify all
the existing, diverse
emoji, which is why
a lot of the weird emoji on
your phone come from Japan.
And it took a bunch
of years, three years.
So the mission of Unicode is to enable
everyone speaking every language
on Earth to be able to use their
language on computers and smartphones.
And this is really considered a
human rights issue for Unicode.
Because the popular
languages the companies
are going to work really hard to encode
because they want to sell devices
in those countries, right?
If you're in India, all
the different languages--
Ethiopia, Thailand-- the popular
languages have now been covered.
And they're working on languages that
are either very minority or tribal,
or sometimes almost extinct.
And there are three major
projects to Unicode.
So the part that we're talking
about today is encoding characters.
There are about 100,000 characters that
Unicode has encoded-- not only emoji,
but when you see the letter A, or
you see the Chinese character for I,
like [SPEAKING CHINESE],, or if you
see different Arabic characters,
all of those have a little
piece in Unicode real estate.
Another major project they do is
basically all the information that
lets you localize a computer
system to a certain geography--
so for example, it's everything
from what is the currency,
how do they look at time?
Is it a 24-hour clock?
Is it not?
What do you call an
emoji in that language?
How do you alphabetize--
things like that--
which is actually different in different
alphabets, which is interesting.
And another thing that
they contribute, in terms
of the entire world of computing,
is a bunch of programming languages
that actually deal with
Unicode so that you
don't have to deal with
Unicode on a very minute basis.
So things like this are,
how do you sort emoji?
How do you alphabetize emoji?
Someone has to give you the
functionality to be able to do that.
So one thing that's really
funny is a couple of years ago,
someone made this creature,
which is a sealdeer,
in part because they
misheard "sealdeer" as CLDR.
And that is why it's one
of the little mascots.
And a CLDR is, again, that library
of geographic localization.
So fast-forward-- 2007 to 2010, Unicode
came out with its first set of emoji.
So this was the original emoji set.
And it just arrived on your phones.
And in fact, I'm actually curious.
Of some of the original
smileys, these are 10 of them.
And I'm curious-- what is your original
favorite smiley in emoji world?
DAVID MALAN: In just
a moment, we'll start
to see the live results coming in.
Wow.
JENNIFER LEE: Tears of joy--
I have to say, tears of joy is actually
Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year,
I think, in 2015.
And it was the first time that an
emoji ever became Word of the Year.
That is fascinating.
So 2010, emoji were introduced
as a set by Unicode.
In 2011, Apple decides to
add emoji into the keyboard.
And then, you see this thing where
emojis just start taking off,
because apparently we tapped
into some visceral desire
by humans to communicate
in small pictures.
So one thing that has been
really fascinating to me
is, what do people think--
what does this emoji mean to you?
This is actually one
of the more classic--
this is actually one
of the emojis-- sorry--
that was added after
the first generation.
And it's actually one
of my favorite emoji.
So if you have the ability to--
we can put it in chat, actually.
I think that might be better.
If people just want to say in chat--
what does the upside-down
emoji mean to you?
And I will say that this is
actually a very confusing question.
Because if you start typing the
emoji upside-down in Google,
the autocomplete are, what does it
mean when a guy sends it to you?
What does it mean when
a girl sends it to you?
Just in terms of the mean--
what does it mean in flirting?
So clearly, this emoji causes a
lot of angst in the community.
So the question is, who
can propose an emoji?
And the short answer is, anyone can.
You just, at this point, send your
proposal-- it should be fully formed,
like the ones that we had discussed
before-- to docsubmit@unicode.org.
And it's this email address.
You get a response that either
it's a good emoji proposal or not
a good emoji proposal.
One of the best emojis that
went through that process
was from a 15-year-old girl who's
Saudi Arabian who lived in Germany.
And she wanted a hijab emoji.
She proposed it in 2016.
And now, it's there.
There was a group of Argentineans who
actually advocated for a mate emoji.
This non-profit that deals with girls'
rights wanted a menstruation emoji.
So they originally
proposed bloody underwear,
which is a terrible emoji
for many different reasons.
Instead, we did blood drop,
which is a more atomic emoji.
One of the most powerful
things I think that has emerged
on emoji keyboards in
the last couple of years
is the fact that you can have
different skin tones, right?
Originally, there were only yellow skin
tones, which was meant to be not human,
but a lot of people
interpreted it to be white.
And the person who
you can thank for that
is a woman named Katrina
Parrott, the woman on the left.
She proposed it.
Because one day, her
daughter came home and said,
I wish I could represent myself on
the emoji keyboard, or with an emoji,
I think it was.
And her mom, Katrina, was
like, that's great, honey.
What's an emoji?
But she then got in
her head, just like I
did-- we're going to go
add skin tones to emoji.
And she approached Unicode
and did a beautiful proposal.
Woman's flat shoe and the
one-piece bathing suit,
because people felt they
didn't only want to sexualize--
yellow-dot bikini.
That was by a mom of three
girls, now four girls.
And one of my favorite ones, also, is
the emoji with one eyebrow raised--
as we sometimes call
it, the Colbert emoji.
That was by just a guy out of Germany.
And sometimes, you see
countries advocating for emoji.
So Finland, for example,
wanted a sauna emoji.
And this is what they proposed,
which is weird and creepy
for all kinds of reasons.
One, these people have no feet.
And they're also naked.
So this was going to pass
zero in the emoji world.
So we helped them take a proposal
and come up with different versions.
What should the steam look like?
Should they be holding a ladle?
Should they be dressed?
Should they have a towel?
And at the end of the day,
after much debate, what ended up
happening was person in
steamy room, which just looks
like a person coming out of a shower.
So you can see the iterations
in terms of how emoji
have evolved in that proposal process.
So one of the reasons I
care a lot about emoji
is because I grew up speaking Chinese.
And you see a lot of
relationship between emoji
and Chinese iteration over time.
So for example, there is
the character for fire.
And if you look at the left, that
is the old character for fire,
2,000 or 3,000 years ago.
And you see how it's evolved.
And you can see the
modern-day emoji on the right.
You can see it for the word for mouth.
You can see-- tree is another one.
To see the consistency from Chinese
characters to the emoji characters
is really fun.
Then, you have sun.
Sorry-- you have moon.
Now, you have sun.
But what's great about Chinese is
you can mix and match the meanings.
So two trees, for example,
in Chinese means forest.
And then, you can have sun and
moon together, which means bright,
[SPEAKING CHINESE].
Did I get that?
And it's fun when you start combining
things that have a more subtle meaning.
So this character is a roof
with a pig underneath it.
So what happens when you
have a roof with a pig?
And so you think maybe it's
a farm, maybe it's a barn.
But it actually means, in Chinese,
home or family, [SPEAKING CHINESE]..
So it's very telling that
the way that the Chinese used
to think of what home was
is where you kept your pigs.
One of the interesting things is how
the female character [SPEAKING CHINESE]
is treated.
So this is a woman underneath a roof.
Again, you might think,
oh, it's home, right?
There's a woman, she's beneath
a roof, maybe something else.
But actually, this
character [SPEAKING CHINESE]
means peace, which means
in a Chinese world,
things were at peace when a
woman was underneath a roof
or at home, which I
think is fascinating.
And one thing that always bothered
me as a little kid was the word--
if you take [SPEAKING CHINESE] and you
add it to the character for a child,
or a little boy, and
you put it together,
you're like, oh, family, or
mother, or something like that.
But actually, no.
This character means good, which
means that the standard for goodness
or quality back in ancient
China was a woman who
had a little kid,
specifically a boy little kid.
That's the standard for achievement.
So you can see, though, the way
that the female character's used
in all kinds of creepy ways in Chinese.
So three women characters
together means evil.
With a tree, this is greedy.
Then, you have slave.
And you have jealousy.
And you have adultery--
all with the female Chinese radical.
And so growing up, that
was imprinted in me.
And then, when I looked at emoji in
2015, I was like, oh, that's funny.
There are all different
ways to be emoji as men.
They had all kinds of jobs.
You could be a cop.
You could be a detective.
You could be a guard.
You could be Santa Claus, even.
But with women at that point, there
were only four things you could be.
You could be a princess, a bride,
a dancer, or a Playboy bunny.
Those were the only four things.
So what was great was Google, I guess,
was also really bothered by this.
And so they were able to
combine emoji in different ways.
So in the same way in Chinese
you can combine emoji,
a lot of the emoji that you see on
your keyboard aren't single emoji.
They're actually combinations of emojis.
So all the skin tones are actually
the original yellow character
plus a skin tone.
The rainbow flag is actually
a rainbow plus a flag
to get you that rainbow flag.
And then, this is key.
A lot of the occupations
that you see are actually
the woman emoji or the man emoji plus
something else, like whether or not
it's a tractor, or it's a
chef, or it's a teacher.
It's in combination you
get to see a new emoji.
So we call those compound emoji.
And that's why it's an interesting
debate, how many emoji are there?
Because there's unique emoji
versus all the combination emojis.
One of our favorite projects is
actually the interracial couple
that we did with Tinder.
So we added the fact that you could
be not just yellow-yellow people
hanging together.
And so one thing I wanted
to know, but I'll just--
we don't actually have
to officially poll.
You can just write it in the chat.
How important are skin
tones to the family emoji?
Because if you notice something--
if you press on a family, they're
only yellow at this point.
And this is actually a
big and complicated debate
for Unicode at this point,
because it's so hard to implement,
and we're trying to figure out
how important is it to people.
And it's been really, really
hard to work through--
much debate, many memos, lots of drama.
So of the emoji that
Emojination has helped create,
these are just some of them.
And these are the people
who helped create it.
I think some of these people may
actually be on this Zoom call,
just for entertainment.
And this is interesting.
I just wanted to show you the
frequency of use of emoji.
Each one of these bands is about
order of magnitude-- not quite,
but about an order of magnitude.
And by far, heart and tears
of joy outrank everything.
In fact, tears of joy by itself
is 10% of all emojis use,
which is stunning to me.
I get it, sort of, but not
that it's 10% of all emoji use.
So it's interesting to figure
out, what is the future of emoji?
I've worked with a professor at Stanford
who feels very strongly that emoji--
you shouldn't have little pictures
regulated by a small group of people,
basically, that work
mostly out of California.
And he came up with an
idea that you can maybe
give every single little
picture a code, and then
pass those codes back and forth.
But then, they have to basically
look up what that picture is.
And it's a little bit tricky.
The other one that I
find really interesting
is something called
a QID emoji proposal.
This is fascinating.
Because it basically proposes
to use a QID, which is--
what is a QID?
A QID is actually the number
in Wikipedia or Wikidata
that assigns every entity
in Wikipedia a number.
And that is actually how different
pages on different language Wikipedias
get linked together-- so
Earth, or President Obama.
They share the same Wikidata QID.
So the idea is, can we use
the ID numbers from Wikipedia
as a form of passing numbers
back and forth around emoji?
And that's a little controversial
for different reasons.
Some people are very mixed about that.
So what emoji are we working on?
In fact, a lot of smiley faces.
One question I have is smiley
faces prove very popular.
Some of our friends have
worked on some of these.
These are not the original generation,
but the second generation of faces.
So if you guys want to take
a poll and kindly tell me--
of those that we passed
in the recent years,
how many really, really
resonate with you?
DAVID MALAN: I'll admit,
Jenny-- some of these newer ones
remind me of Garbage Pail Kids from our
days growing up, if you remember those.
JENNIFER LEE: I'm curious--
oh, good!
Thank you for the three-heart one.
That was a controversial one, actually.
Because people felt like the
heart eyes one sort of was--
I felt like it was very different.
Because one, I thought the heart eyes
one-- like the double heart eyes--
was about lust, whereas this one--
the little hearts are more about,
this is something I really like.
So there's more to go, but
I feel like we can just do--
I have a little Emoji Spelling Bee,
if you guys want to get in on that.
Or I'm totally available
for any deep emoji questions
that you have in your heart.
DAVID MALAN: So please feel free to
raise your blue hand at this point.
And as folks start to raise
their hands, Jenny, I'm
curious to ask-- how
problematic has it been
that different companies
and different devices
can depict the same
emojis in different ways?
I, for instance, for
at least a year, used
to think that the emoji that looked
like this was someone doing jazz hands
sort of excitedly.
And I only eventually realized
that I was hugging people
every time I sent that one.
And I'm wondering just how
problematic or how deliberate
this is, that different devices--
JENNIFER LEE: I'm going to answer
that question slightly differently.
The main problem with jazz
hands ones isn't the fact
that different companies show it
differently, which is a problem.
It's mostly that we
discovered a little bit
too late that while emoji smileys can
have hands, they can't have arms--
which is why it kind of works when
you have the emoji that's thinking.
But it really doesn't work
when you have no hands.
So it ends up being either
groping hands or jazz hands,
mostly because you
can't depict the arms.
This is also an issue for us
because we're trying to do salute.
How do you show a hand?
Do you show the arm?
It's very weird, because
smiley faces apparently
have disembodied hands
and no body to go with it.
So separately, yes, it is a
big problem that all-- so one
of the key things about
Unicode is that it tells you
what the character is, and
gives you a guidance image,
but Unicode draws images zero.
When it shows up on your phone or
device, it's because Apple, or Google,
or Microsoft, or Facebook, or
Twitter-- they have designers in-house
that took this back from Unicode,
and then like drew it a certain way.
And there have been a lot
of problems in the past.
So there's like actually
an emoji with X's for eyes.
And that's supposed to
be dizzy-face on Apple.
But they did it with X's, which just
looks like dead, concussive face.
And so there's been a lot of
effort in the recent years
to try to get everyone to align for
a certain amount of consistency.
OK, more questions?
DAVID MALAN: Yes, let's call
on someone from the group.
You'll see a prompt to unmute
yourself if called on here.
Let's see.
Do use the blue hands.
And [INAUDIBLE], who do we have first?
STUDENT: OK, so I'm going
to ask a basic question.
So are we just proposing
emoji and handing them over
to the developer team, or just
are we being there for every step?
Do we get to contribute to our
idea throughout the whole process?
JENNIFER LEE: So if
you're a normal person--
so just not part of Apple or Google--
you submit the proposal.
It comes in.
It's very mysterious.
You'll get some emails back.
Sometimes, if you join us in our
Emojination Slack, we'll help you,
so at least you have a
little bit more transparency.
And then, you go back and forth.
And then, at the point
that it's accepted,
it gets sucked into the emoji vortex.
And you get to see the updates.
The Unicode Consortium publishes all
their documents on their website.
And so you'll see your emoji
weirdly moved through the process.
Did it get approved or thumbed-up
at a quarterly meeting?
Did it get approved in the annual thing?
And then, once it
disappears into the vendors,
like the Apple, Google,
Facebooks of the world,
I basically know nothing
until World Emoji Day.
Actually, World Emoji Day is July
17, which is in a couple days.
And that is where oftentimes,
people will reveal their emojis.
Sometimes, you can get sneak peeks.
But for many of the emoji
that I even proposed,
I have no idea what they're going
to look like until World Emoji Day.
Like dumpling-- I was like, oh, that's
a really photorealistic dumpling when
it came out.
But it's a cool feeling, right?
Because it's billions
of keyboards impacted.
You are one person, and you've
managed to touch humanity
in a very, very little way,
but across billions of people.
So if you add it up, it
still feels like a lot.
More questions.
STUDENT: Oh, hello.
Can you hear me?
JENNIFER LEE: I can hear you, yeah.
STUDENT: What I want to
know is, what is this?
Is this a praying hands,
or is it a high five?
JENNIFER LEE: Yes, so
this is interesting.
It is actually originally neither.
It is originally the Japanese
way of saying thank you.
So if you type "thanks," often, at
least in a English language keyboard,
this will come up.
That being said, emoji can be
whatever you want it to be.
Does that make sense?
So what is the upside-down
smiley face mean?
That's an interesting situation.
In some ways, just like
in any language, it
means what the consensus
of something may mean.
So now, we have the word "lit."
Something is "lit."
But it used to mean lit on
fire, or past tense of light.
But now, it has its own slang meaning.
And I think a lot of people
do use this as high five.
It can also be prayer.
But it was originally thank you.
But you can use it any way you
want, actually, I would say.
Yeah, it can mean namaste.
Oh, question?
STUDENT: OK, I'm Mohammad from Egypt.
I was asking about--
you know the Chinese
player called Yao Ming?
JENNIFER LEE: Yes, Yao Ming--
tall Chinese person.
STUDENT: 2010 or 2011,
people used to create
images using 2 brackets and
[INAUDIBLE] with these kinds of emojis.
It needed proposal and approval
from the Unicode committee--
or how were they created?
JENNIFER LEE: As I mentioned before,
one of the things that Unicode does not
ever do is celebrities, deities, logos,
or brands, just because once an emoji,
always an emoji.
And there's also a lot of IP issues.
So you can't ever have--
what is a famous--
even a Mona Lisa emoji I
think wouldn't be possible,
even though it's an artwork.
So if it's an emoji
based on Yao Ming, they
would have to find a Chinese basketball
player, or something like that.
There are interesting ways to
describe people using existing emoji,
if that makes sense.
But anything that is very
specific Unicode doesn't touch.
That being said, there are lots
of wonderful stickers, and GIFs,
and other visual means of
communication through messaging
that the rest of the
world has covered, right?
So Unicode is very specific.
Emoji is very specific.
It is pictures that can be
encoded in the same form as text.
And the way that I often like to
explain to people what it means is,
can it show up in the
subject line of an email?
If it can, then it's an emoji.
If it's not, it's probably a sticker.
So a lot of these
Animoji, or the Memoji,
or a Bitmoji that you see a lot
of platforms adding-- they're
just like GIFs or PNGs
or JPEGs or whatever.
They're just little images
that you can still send,
you just can't put in the
subject line of an email.
DAVID MALAN: Well, thank you,
Mohammed, for that question.
Jenny, mindful of
everyone's time, should we
spend a few minutes
on Emoji Spelling Bee
to give everyone a chance to partake?
And then, if we have time, we
can take a few final questions?
JENNIFER LEE: Yeah, yeah.
Am I-- hold on, let me do the share.
So this is tricky.
If you have a phone, I would actually
recommend doing it on your phone.
Because it's actually really hard
to submit emoji on your device.
But if you go to
emojispellingbee.com/submit,
one thing-- this is actually a very big
emoji that we've gone through several
rounds with.
And we're still not sure how to
completely convey earthquake.
There is some debate.
Some people say, well,
you can already convey it.
I don't necessarily agree with that.
But I'm curious, basically,
from the population--
just everyone, if I asked you to try
to convey earthquake through emoji, how
you would do it, if that makes sense.
So the site is
emojispellingbee.com/submit.
And then, you just type
in your name, and you
can type in what the prompt was, and
then you can just type in your answer.
This is actually information
that I will send to a researcher,
if that makes sense.
Because we're trying to figure
out if there are semantic
gaps within emoji land.
But I can also screen share
while we're on the vote.
We can also screen share.
These are some of the
things that people have done
for earthquake, which is interesting.
Can you guys see this?
Oh, can you guys see
yourself, then, as a result,
which is a little bit problematic?
I'm going to try to--
do you see mostly the Chrome?
DAVID MALAN: We see your Emoji Spelling
Bee tab, but also your other tabs.
JENNIFER LEE: That's fine.
That's fine, I don't care.
But you can see all the little--
oh, that's cute.
I like that one for earthquake.
This one-- that's cool.
I will take this back to a bunch
of different folks and share it.
This is actually pretty good.
Also on Emoji Spelling Bee-- this is
just for our own entertainment, again--
if you can describe COVID, this entire
year, through emoji, take your time.
And as you do that, I'll
answer your next question.
STUDENT: Great, hi.
JENNIFER LEE: Hi.
STUDENT: I just have a question.
Recently, a few years back, some
of the emojis got modernized.
And they weren't as
pressing as skin tones.
It was like the elephant and
the turtle that got modernized.
So I was wondering what
process that goes through,
and who decides that
they need to be updated?
JENNIFER LEE: So it's on the vendors.
They decide they want
to update their emojis.
So I think Android and
Google, maybe a year or two
ago-- maybe more than a
year or two-- they suddenly
did a complete refresh of all of their
emojis to get their visuals updated.
I think Facebook recently did
a release that also unified
their looks across a bunch of things.
So in terms of when you are using a
device, the decision about that way
a specific emoji is depicted was from
the creator of that device or operating
system, right?
So Facebook controls emoji.
Whatsapp has slightly
different emoji from Facebook,
which I think is interesting.
They're owned by the same company.
Google, Apple, Twitter--
Samsung has its own little
splinter group of emoji,
even though they also
use a form of Android.
And that makes sense.
So yes.
DAVID MALAN: Well, Jenny, thank
you so much for joining us today.
And thank you to everyone
for joining us here.
If you'd like to follow up with
Jenny, her contact information
is on her final slide here,
jenny@emojination.org.
And thank you for making
today possible, Jenny.
