First ever Emojicon in San Francisco!

The first ever conference on emojis — Emojicon — will be held from November 4–6, 2016 in San Francisco. See below for the abstract we just submitted :) Check out the site for more information about registration and the calls for submissions. Hope to see you there!

UPDATE (11/1/2016): We’ll be presenting Saturday Nov. 5 at 2pm! Check out the full schedule here!

🐍s, 🌹s, and major 🔑s: An introduction to emoji data science

Emojis have been called a “new type of language.” According to statistics cited by Ad Week, as much as 92% of the online population uses emojis. Twitter reports that since 2014 alone, over 110 billion emojis have been tweeted.

Yet, despite the profusion of emojis in digital life, little research has been done that leverages emojis to understand popular sentiment. We believe that emoji data science, a largely unexplored field, might be a powerful new methodology for both the computational social sciences as well as fast data journalism.

We’ll share preliminary research based on an analysis of millions of tweets that explores the relevance of emoji analytics to fields ranging from pop culture (i.e. the Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift dispute), to politics (the US presidential elections as well as Brexit), to gender norms, to the Olympics, and more.

We’ll also introduce concepts including emoji valence, hashtag-emoji co-occurrence, and sentiment analysis that combine the fields of computational linguistics and natural language processing to provide building blocks for understanding what emojis mean and what they reveal about our culture.