Talk:Emoji/Archives/2016/April

Miscommunication

My colleagues at GroupLens Research have a paper just out on miscommunication via emoji, measuring the amount of semantic difference people judge for the same emoji across and within platforms. It's a conflict of interest for me to add the information here. If it's notable for inclusion, would someone add it?http://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-miscommunication-using-emoji/ as well as http://gizmodo.com/that-emoji-does-not-mean-what-you-think-it-means-1770296372 and several other science/tech writing publications. Runner1928 (talk) 04:02, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Emoji Precursors

I think the history section could benefit from additional information about precursors to emojis. This could clarify confusion for readers who think they've seen emoji in American chat messengers since the 90s. The confusion arises from the similarities between emoji and smileys, and I think a section about precursors could make the differences and similarities clear to readers. A case can be made, and has been by various bloggers, that emoticons and smileys are precursors to emoji. Early chat messengers often replaced text-only emoticons such as :-) with a picture-based smileys. These were largely the same as what emoji later became: pictures of expressive cartoon faces and other pictures, with faces usually being colored yellow.

A big part of emoji history was when they were included in unicode. This is another point where we can connect it with precursors such as smileys and other cartoony pictures. Such ideograms were included in Unicode Version 1.0 in 1991 in sections such as Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous Technical, and its Dingbats section. As a result, Unicode 1.1 included pictures such as these: ☹, ☺️, ☠, ☝️, ✌️, ✍, ❤️, ❣, ♨️, ✈️, ⌛, ⌚, ☀️, ☁️, ☂, ❄️, ☃, ☄, ☎️, ⌨, ✉️, ✏️, ✒️, ✂️, ☢, ☣, ✡, ☸, ☯, ✝, ☪, ☮, and ❇.

Those seem like American equivalents to emoji, and they were included in international standards in 1991, seven years before emoji were created and nineteen years before emoji got into unicode. They are all now retroactively counted as emoji. It seems that this means emoji history begins with these precursors, and perhaps the history section could reflect that. And if not, couldn't readers benefit from an awareness that there were precursors to emoji, and from knowing what the differences are between symbols like these and emoji proper? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:A000:1226:8039:D48B:684A:A002:6C60 (talk) 23:07, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Should explain the difference between this article, Emoji, and Emoticon in other related article.