Digital Lab Assignment #5

Composing my emoji poem turned out to be a lot more difficult and tedious than I originally thought it would be. I think that language is inherently beautiful, and I was frustrated with the emojis because I didn’t feel like they allowed me to express my narrative in the way I wanted to. When using traditional language, I am able to create similes, metaphors, images, and etc. using words. I feel like I need language to properly express the complex ideas in the beautiful way I intend. The emojis limited the artistic and literary expression that I normally cherish when I am writing. The emojis were incredibly limited and I didn’t enjoy dealing with those limitations when trying to write a poem.

Although I thought this was an interesting process that was informative, I did not feel like I could effectively communicate my ideas solely through emojis. It was much easier to translate pages from Xu Bing’s Book From the Ground than it was to create my own story with emojis. I will say that completing this week’s exercise helped me appreciate Xu Bing’s emoji book a lot more than I did before. It’s quite impressive that he was able to write a cohesive, understandable story with just emojis. I found it was difficult to translate my own ideas into emojis and I also thought it was much more difficult to translate my partner’s emoji story than it was to translate one of Bing’s chapters.

I thought my partner’s translation of my poem accurately represented how I felt it came across with the emojis. I think the translation emphasizes my point that emojis do not have the ability to describe the world around us in the beautiful and significant ways they should be. The translation skewed the narrative and perspective I intended to convey, but I think it was an accurate translation of the emojis themselves. My partner accurately interpreted and translated the main ideas of my emoji poem. For example, she correctly interpreted that the girl in my poem observed the nature around her, she has a dog, and that she went to bed at the end of the poem. However, these are all very basic and simplistic which is not how I intended them to come across. She didn’t correctly translate that the character in my poem was waiting for her partner to come home to her. She inaccurately interpreted that the girl was seeking love– the character in my poem already has love. Her translation also lacked the emotions that I tried to express through the emojis. Despite the fact that emojis are meant to convey emotion, I didn’t feel like they properly expressed the emotion of the speaker of my poem.

The more I think about it, it is entirely possible that I’m just awful at using emojis to express complex and interesting ideas. I know other people felt frustrated with the emojis, but I thought my partner did a far better job at including more detailed descriptions of how the characters in her story were feeling and what they were thinking. I am a language lover, and I don’t use emojis that frequently in my day-to-day life anyway. When I do, I use them in conjunction with words and language; emojis are supplemental to language– in my opinion, they cannot be used on their own to properly tell a story, express emotions, describe an event, and etc.

I think it is extremely important to explore the world of digital humanities as well as the phenomenon of “Literature by the Numbers.” However, after completing this lab, I am feeling a strong preference for good, old-fashioned English literature. Writing using digital languages and codes is extremely tedious and at times incredibly frustrating. In some ways, I suppose it forces me to think more carefully about how I want my stories or poems to turn out, but at the same time it never feels like there are adequate means to describe the content of my writing. I compared the process of writing in emojis to learning to speak and write in a foreign language; it felt like I was speaking in the way a little kid would. I didn’t feel like I was able to properly express myself through the emojis.