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A missing component of almost all discussion and research I've seen on the use of emoji is the mapping of text (names, keywords, emoticons) to emoji on different platforms.
On some platforms ":)" is translated to "🙂 Slightly Smiling Face" and ":D" to "😀 Grinning Face". On other platforms they both go to the same emoji, one or the other.
On Discord and Slack, ":pray:" is the canonical name for "🙏 Person with Folded Hands". However on both you can use ":thanks:" to search and find that emoji, while also finding "🫂 People Hugging" on both and the not-a-real-emoji "Thank You!" image on Slack.
There are many other examples of these phenomena. I've never found any source that even documents these mappings and relationships, let alone discussion or research that accounts for this. I'd love to see emojipedia or a similar site include this information on their emoji entries.
This idea percolates in my head from time to time. This specific post was prompted by seeing a graph about the use of "😂 Face with Tears of Joy" and "😭 Loudly Crying Face" over time (one increasing, the other decreasing). I think it was meant to show a change in overall happiness and sentiment across emoji users. I suspect that somewhere there are platforms changing the default/only results when trying to search for "cry" or "tear" emojis, and that is part of the cause, but not recognized as a factor in the research.
If you know where to find data on this topic, such as the keyword lists that Discord and Slack use to turn :thanks: into :pray:, or the full list of emoticon->emoji mappings for some popular platform(s), I'd love some links!
EDIT: A helpful friend pointed me toward one piece of this puzzle. The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository includes an Annotations section, which provides tags / terms / keywords associated with many emoji. E.G. 🙏 "folded hands" has English Annotations of "| ask | hand | please | pray | thanks", and this is why ":thanks:" on Discord and Slack get you the "folded hands" emoji (which they canonicalize as ":pray:"). These annotations get updated every year or two, and exist in many languages with different amounts of coverage of the whole emoji space. Here's the current version for "Romance" languages: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/cldr-aux/charts/37/annotations/romance.html
On some platforms ":)" is translated to "🙂 Slightly Smiling Face" and ":D" to "😀 Grinning Face". On other platforms they both go to the same emoji, one or the other.
On Discord and Slack, ":pray:" is the canonical name for "🙏 Person with Folded Hands". However on both you can use ":thanks:" to search and find that emoji, while also finding "🫂 People Hugging" on both and the not-a-real-emoji "Thank You!" image on Slack.
There are many other examples of these phenomena. I've never found any source that even documents these mappings and relationships, let alone discussion or research that accounts for this. I'd love to see emojipedia or a similar site include this information on their emoji entries.
This idea percolates in my head from time to time. This specific post was prompted by seeing a graph about the use of "😂 Face with Tears of Joy" and "😭 Loudly Crying Face" over time (one increasing, the other decreasing). I think it was meant to show a change in overall happiness and sentiment across emoji users. I suspect that somewhere there are platforms changing the default/only results when trying to search for "cry" or "tear" emojis, and that is part of the cause, but not recognized as a factor in the research.
If you know where to find data on this topic, such as the keyword lists that Discord and Slack use to turn :thanks: into :pray:, or the full list of emoticon->emoji mappings for some popular platform(s), I'd love some links!
EDIT: A helpful friend pointed me toward one piece of this puzzle. The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository includes an Annotations section, which provides tags / terms / keywords associated with many emoji. E.G. 🙏 "folded hands" has English Annotations of "| ask | hand | please | pray | thanks", and this is why ":thanks:" on Discord and Slack get you the "folded hands" emoji (which they canonicalize as ":pray:"). These annotations get updated every year or two, and exist in many languages with different amounts of coverage of the whole emoji space. Here's the current version for "Romance" languages: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/cldr-aux/charts/37/annotations/romance.html