Ten News EXTRA: Emoji expert Jennifer Daniel 🤯
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🤣 It's Saturday, which means The Ten News is getting EXTRA! 🎨 In this week's edition we look at emojis! 🤯 We're joined by Jennifer Daniel, chair of the emoji subcommittee at the Unicode Consortium, to get the full scoop on exploding heads and boomerangs in our full interview. 😀 Plus! The emoji-themed Trivia Question of the Day!
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Transcript
Various Voices 0:00
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
Bethany Van Delft 0:07
I'm Bethany Van Delft. And this is no ordinary episode of The Ten News. This is The Ten News gets extra.
This Saturday, we're talking emojis. Did you ever wonder how an emoji gets made? We did. And we went to an expert on the topic, Jennifer Daniel, chair of the emoji subcommittee at the Unicode Consortium, there is an emoji subcommittee. Nice. Show creator Tracy Leeds Kaplan got the full scoop on exploding heads and boomerangs in our full interview. Check it out.
Tracy Kaplan 0:57
Welcome, thank you for joining us today on The Ten News. We're really excited to have you here. We've been bouncing emojis back and forth on the team in preparing for this interview today. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners, and then tell us what you do?
Jennifer Daniel 1:12
Hi, my name is Jennifer Daniel. And I am the Chair of the emoji subcommittee for the Unicode Technical Committee, which is part of the Unicode Consortium. And I make emojis, I also work at Google and I make emoji. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot of overlap there,
Tracy Kaplan 1:33
I'd love for you to explain to our listeners, what exactly is the Unicode Consortium and who's on it.
Jennifer Daniel 1:40
So Unicode is a volunteer based organization, and they're responsible for encoding the world's languages. So you could think like, basically, they're the reason that if you send a message in Hindi from one device, the person you're sending it to, can read it in Hindi. Before Unicode existed, that was a real problem, people couldn't communicate in their native tongues around the world. So think of it this way, right? Every letter on the screen that you read, whether it be a tablet, or computer or phone or anything that's in a digital space, every letter is assigned a code point. So, if you send someone a facepalm, emoji, the code point for facepalm is U1F926, right? So emoji, even though they look like pictures, are really a font. And that's why they sit next to words is because they operate like letters. And they're interchangeable, with how you text or communicate online, we work with people all over the world. So like I mentioned, Unicode is volunteer-based, right. So it's a small group of people who can kind of offer their work for free, and do this work. But what we try to do is surround ourselves by experts, so people who understand how people communicate, or maybe they have a certain expertise in... talking to a doctor recently a cardiovascular surgeon around the anatomical heart and lungs and a new emoji for X-ray. So we try to surround yourself with people who really understand the subject matter quite a bit. When making decisions around what is useful, what will be used a lot what is currently being used a lot before we add it, which is why it takes almost two years to add an emoji it takes a really long time because we're we're vetting it fairly thoroughly.
Tracy Kaplan 3:33
So what I really want to know is when the consortium makes a decision, those emojis are forever, right once you can't then decide a year later to delete something like once it's out there, it's out there.
Jennifer Daniel 3:46
Yeah. So it's true. Emoji once they're added are there forever. There's a real permanence to them. Which is really interesting if you think about it, right? Because language is flexible and fluid and transient and morphable and emojis are not an emoji stand still.
Tracy Kaplan 4:08
I really want to understand how did you go from being a little kid growing up figuring out what you wanted to do to now being an emoji expert? Like, did you just wake up one day and you're like, I'm gonna do emojis tell us how that all came to be?
Jennifer Daniel 4:24
Oh, boy, I bet you know, if you had told me just five years ago, that I would be making emoji. I may have said, what really never imagined. I've always been someone who is interested in drawing, and just language but I didn't have a way to articulate that was what I was interested in. I just, I've always been fascinated by it and drawn to how people talk and everything from accents to the words they use and then how they articulate it in pictures. If I don't know, just like anyone else, I just have a curiosity about the world. And all those curiosities have just led me down this path where now I get to work on what I work on now.
Tracy Kaplan 5:11
That's so great. So can you share a little bit about how emojis are actually designed?
Jennifer Daniel 5:15
Yes. So, you know, after the consortium makes their list of recommendations, and they become code points and emoji, it's up to designers to well, to get involved. And the first step is we take a look at the image in the proposal. So anyone can propose an emoji. And we take it we try to see what was the intent of the person who proposed it in the first place. Then the next step is we confer with subject matter experts, right? There's, there's nothing that doesn't have a subject matter expert, whether it be the knot emoji, and we talk to people who are experts in tying knots. Or if it's an anatomical heart or lungs, we talk to doctors, if it's a boomerang, we talk to people who have made boomerangs. And we try to get a sense of is this emoji authentic. So like a good example of that might even be the boomerang emoji. And in an earlier version of our design, the angle of the boomerang was more around 90 degrees. And when we showed it to someone who was familiar with boomerangs, they were like you know that, if a boomerang was at that angle, it would never come back to you, because of the way that you know, the precision of the torque and the angularity and the velocity, it would, it would just wouldn't, it wouldn't be a boomerang. And so we, you know, we had to change the angle so that it was much wider. And so you have to really balance accuracy with you know, a disposition of friendliness.
Tracy Kaplan 6:47
It's been really wonderful to see kind of the expansion of skin color and having more gender representation. How has the Unicode Consortium played a role in that and what's coming next in that space?
Jennifer Daniel 7:03
We're trying to identify globally relevant concepts. When there are as many genders as there are people in the world, as many foods as there are ingredients on the planet, and a variety of objects that are really only limited by our imagination, every addition to the emoji keyboard is at risk of creating zones of exclusion without consciously trying. So the best we can do is to ensure emoji continued to be as broad and as flexible and as fluid as possible, just like language and just like people.
Tracy Kaplan 7:41
I don't know if you set it or if it was an article that was referencing you by the prayer hands, that you could interpret it as a high five and I had never seen it before. And now I can't unsee it like now to me, it is now a high five. Until someone, until I read that it had never even occurred to me that it was something different.
Jennifer Daniel 8:03
You know, it's so funny is that I think it's one of those things that people love to debate just to have something to debate like, is prayer hands or high five, or is it? You know, is it definitively prayer hands? And my answer is, why not both? Right? Why can't it be both? It doesn't have to just be one or the other? If you need a high five, and that conveys high five-ness that is a high five as far as I'm concerned.
Tracy Kaplan 8:28
What is your go-to emoji? What's your favorite?
Jennifer Daniel 8:31
Oh, um, so lately, I have been using the tornado emoji plus anything else to convey just my life, so I might use tornado poop. If things are going really not so great. Or maybe the cartwheel emoji and the black hole emoji when I want to convey that things are not going good right now. I like to put emoji together. Also, sometimes punctuate with emoji, so I'll use the clown face emoji sometimes when I'm joking around. And hopefully, the person I'm talking to understands that I'm just being silly.
Tracy Kaplan 9:13
Any, any sneak peeks? Or inside news that you can give us on what emoji are coming soon.
Jennifer Daniel 9:22
Oh, absolutely. We have a list of 36 new emoji coming out in the next emoji release. And they are available online, which I can share a URL for, I suppose after we chat. Some of them include melting face, we have a salute face coming as well. Bubbles, and a lotus flower and a number of other emojis.
Tracy Kaplan 9:49
Okay for all of our listeners at home who love using emojis and filling up their parent’s text chats with emojis, how could they learn more?
Jennifer Daniel 9:58
You could go to unicode.org is all the information around what Unicode does. And that's everything from every language they support, including emoji. And really, the internet is just you know, there's there's everyone's an emoji expert, everyone's an emoji historian. So you'll find lots of people talking about it. Play Yeah, I try to think of there's like a really just use them. You know, if you really want to understand something, I would just say, just use it, and you can come to your own conclusion. Love it.
Tracy Kaplan 10:31
Okay, last question. And then I promised we'll, we'll let you go. How do you rate our use of emojis on The Ten News?
Jennifer Daniel 10:38
Oh, I love it. I love it. I think they you know, they give you some sense of curiosity. Like what is today's episode gonna be about? I think I know, there's a nose. What is the nose mean? Is it a pun or is it literally smelling? So I think it's great. I love that you guys use them.
Bethany Van Delft 10:59
Up next, it's time for
Sound Bit 11:02
What? What? What's the big idea?
Bethany Van Delft 11:05
Trivia on The Ten. What was the first documented use of a smiley face and text? I'll give you a hint. It was before computers or even typewriters? Was it A) 1939? b 1648 or c 2001?
Did you guess it? The answer is B!
According to the Atlantic magazine, it was used by poet Robert Herrick in his poem "The Fortune." This is more than 300 years before emoticons were introduced by the playdough for computer system. In 1972, Herrick ended a line of his poem with a colon and close parentheses, which we all know kind of looks like a smiley face. It's possible it was just an accident. But that kind of punctuation wasn't super common back then, to begin with, and the line of the poem in question does have the word smiling in it. I wonder if people 300 years from now will be as curious about the emojis we use today. Huh? Thinking emoji face. Times up. But before we go, here's a quick note for the grownups. Want even more great content from The Ten News? Sign up for The Ten News newsletter, aka The Ten News-letter. It's a free bi-weekly email with even more stories to enjoy together, and we made it easy for you. The link to join is in the show notes. And on our website, thetennews.com. Thanks for listening to The Ten News. Look out for our new episodes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and extras on Saturdays. The Ten News is a co-production of Small But Mighty Media and next chapter podcast and is distributed by iHeartRadio. Our editorial director is Tracey Crooks, editing and sound design by Andrew Hall. Our creative producer is Jenna Pascua. Stephen Tompkins is our head of audience development and our production assistant is Sarah Olender. Our production director is Jeremiah Tittle, and The Ten News is executive produced by Donald Albright and show creator Tracy Leeds Kaplan. Do you want to be part of the show? We wanted to have a grown up healthy record a question, a joke, or a fun fact you want to share and email it to us at hello@thetennews.com and show your love for The Ten News by going to your favorite podcast app and submitting a rating and review. I'm telling you, it really helps others find the show so they can join us for the fun too. I'm Bethany Van Delft, and thanks for listening to The Ten News. Blowing kisses emoji. Waving hand emoji. Fist bump emoji. Bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Sources for this episode
Trivia Question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#cite_note-10
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/the-first-emoticon-may-have-appeared-in-1648/360622/
