Universal Iconic Language?
An Outline for my whole project:
CRITICAL COMPONENT
- Examining iconic language and its history
- Intro to Xu Bing’s Book From the Ground, From Point to Point as a case study in iconic language
- Examining pictograms or emojis as a language
- Grammar
- syntax
- how we read them differently than words
- iconic
- practicality
CREATIVE COMPONENT
3. Create my own pictogram story made from emojis, that college aged students should be able to understand
- One that is a 6 character story
- One that is 140 characters
- One that is a microfiction- 300 characters
4. Distribution of creative component to peers
- record responses and reactions
- Reflection on my level of success
Essay draft/beginnings:
You have just stepped off of a plane into an airport in a faraway country, a country that does not speak your native language. You desperately need to use the bathroom, but you can’t speak to anyone or read the signage. You might search for a symbol like this:
This can be found in most spaces, and because of it you have no trouble locating the restroom. This is because most everyone can understand this symbol; it carries meaning where word and language can’t. These kinds of symbols can be found in a myriad of places. They tell us where to find the bathroom and which one to use, how to build a dresser or change a diaper and warn us of potential danger or hazards.
Iconic language dates back to the ancient hieroglyphs. Humans’ have carried an obsession with the idea of the universal language… evident in the Tower of Babel legend found in the Bible
This concept of iconic language captivated Chinese artist Xu Bing, who collected safety instruction cards from aircrafts over his many years of travelling. He observed that as time passed the instruction became increasingly image based with fewer words. These observations lead him to create a computer algorithm that converts English and Chinese into pictograms. This algorithm is Xu’s attempt at creating a universal language. The artist based his project Book From the Ground on this concept, eventually writing an entire novel, From Point to Point, in this new language. Anyone that has thorough experience of the modern world, Xu believes, should be able to understand his text.
Book from the Ground: From Point to Point follows Mr. Black, a yuppie that lives in a normal metropolitan environment and experience normal metropolitan life. The story follows his morning routine, his mad dash to work, and his online search for love.
There have been previous attempts at creating universal human language, mostly pictographic. Some of these languages had developed grammar IE blissymbols. Can similar grammar be applied to emojis? Emojis to me are the most salient pictographic language form used by my peers today. In an iPhone keyboard emojis are separates into 8 categories, each named with a pictogram. The translation of these pictograms appears to me as emotion, animals, food, sports, city, electronics, symbols, and flags. How might these categories already establish a grammar to the symbols?
TO COME:
Obviously my creative component and all that goes with it. There is a lot to be fleshed out in my draft… I want to do a more intense linguistic study of emojis and give more background on pictographic languages, their current and older history. Why are humans so interested in it? Also, chiefly, how the way we read pictographic stories is entirely different from written language. There is no 1:1 character to word translation. Many symbols could create one word while one symbol can carry many many words and meaning with it. The images are tied to notions, visions, sounds, sensory experiences way more so than a textual word. Reading image language is like a regression to how we read when first learning perhaps.
Hey Sam this looks like such an exciting project. You and graham have similar ones – it might be beneficial to collaborate or find someway to connect the two of them.
I think you did a good job of your environmental scan and research – bliss symbols are so cool but I don’t know if you will have the space for that. It appears that you are trying to both understand where emojis come from, how they have created their own grammar rules, and explore their storytelling capabilities? If you are trying to all of that – that seems like a lot so I would just be aware of how much you are trying to tackle.
I like the story examples. I think the 6 character, 140 character, and 300 character stories are good boundaries for demonstrating the storytelling power of emojis. Are you going to test the stories out – to see if people understand them?
I think your last section where you ask a bunch of questions was the most interesting for me. Particularly, the questions surrounding pictograms as having more of a full sensory experience.
If you are interested in the history of pictograms – I have a strange personal connection with those. In 12th grade, I translated “Between Walls” by Williams Carlos Williams into Akkadian cuneiform (one of the first languages) and I can share the dictionaries I used or my translation if you want to look at those.
I’m so into academic response to emojis — I wish I could read a hundred more projects like yours and Graham’s. I’m especially excited about the emoji stories and think it would be awesome if you shared them with our class specifically to record responses… I wonder if we would read them differently after a semester’s worth of studying word + image combos, or if emojis are so ubiquitous to college students now that the average Davidsonian walking around campus would be able to translate your emoji narratives into comprehensive stories just as well as our class.
How long are you thinking the critical part is going to be? I too think the history of pictograms + emojis is definitely interesting and relevant and probably a huge topic, so I’m curious to see how you’ll identify the most important parts to focus on. And definitely agreed with you on how differently we read emoji stories from written stories — it’s much more of a contextual experience.
So cool! Excited to see more.
Yo Sam,
Obviously I really like this project, due to my eerily similar one. I can’t wait to see your creative portion when it’s done.
We talked about this a little in class, but I really think it’s interesting that you’re exploring other modes of symbolic communication, and this quest for a totally universal language of universal signs. Why is that people are so interested in that? It reminds me of that part in This Means This/This Means That where he talks about how present day society would communicate with a society thousands of years into the future. They probably wouldn’t speak the same language, and the symbols we think of as universal would be long gone, like the radioactive symbol or the universal symbol for bathrooms, etc. I’m not sure that is helpful to your project, but it seemed connected in my head.
In my project I’m definitely looking at emojis as sentences – like, to the point where I’m sentence diagramming them. But of course with picture symbols it becomes more complicated, because it’s also literally a picture in some ways. (We talked about all this in class). My point being that if you’re looking at grammar at all, feel free to hmu and we can compare notes, because it’s a complicated subject.
Also I’m still digging the idea of collaborating with the website project.