Emoji Data Usage
Emojis are a quickly spreading and rather unknown communication phenomenon which occasionally receives attention in the mainstream press, but lacks the scientific exploration it deserves. There are some attempts at investigating the global distribution of emojis, which perform analysis of the spatial distribution of emojis on a dataset of 17 million (and growing) geo-encoded tweets containing emojis by running a cluster analysis over countries represented as emoji distributions and performing correlation analysis of emoji distributions and World Development Indicators.
Scientists have shown that emoji usage tends to draw quite a realistic picture of the living conditions in various parts of our world by performing a correlation analysis between emoji distributions across countries and a series of the World Development Indicators. Emojis with the strongest correlation clearly describe the indicator in question which allows to conclude that emoji usage is indicative of the living conditions in different parts of the world.
However, there are some challenges in using emojis doing big data analysis: (1) not all people use a specific social network and (2) different sociodemographic groups use the same social network in different countries. Nevertheless, the using of emoji data objectively depicts the state in our social network of choice.
