The world’s favorite photo-sharing app recently became even more popular by adding the Internet’s preferred communication medium. Instagram now lets you comment with and search hashtags by emoji, making it that much more fun to find photos of cute dogs.
The Instagram engineering team wasted no time turning our early emoji-ing into a stat-filled, analytical look at what it all means. While the deep dive yields plenty of attention-grabbing takes (the bowling emoji typically finds itself linked to various booze emoji!), one dataset that stands out is “The Hearts of Instagram.”
Here, Instagram breaks down what the different hues and shapes are associated with.
And sure enough, if you search the three pink hearts emoji, you’ll also find photos of flowers. Green hearts show a lot of nature photos. Of course, this is hardly the first study of emoji use. People have dedicated plenty of serious thought to understanding what seems like a simple question: Why do we use these adorable characters, and what do they mean when we do?
One recent study titled “A Contrastive Analysis of American and Japanese Online Communication: A Study of UMC Function and Usage in Popular Personal Weblogs,” looked at how Americans and the Japanese used emoji differently. According to the research, English-speaking emoji users were more “direct,” while Japanese users erred toward using them as decoration or to suggest something for the recipient to deduce. One method the researchers used? Asking users to read their emoji messages out loud. The pitch and tone they used helped them understand what the emoji meant and how they should be interpreted.
A lot depends on the recipient, really. According to “Do you know what I mean > :(, A linguistic study of the understanding of emoticons and emojis in text messages,” some sort of text needs to happen at some point in a conversational history in order for an emoji to make any sense. And, of course, “they can have different meanings depending on the situation, and the mood or the person for whom the message is intended.” Basically, a poop emoji by any other name…
The report, happily, found that emoji are often used in a positive way, and 70 percent of the time are sent to “make the text easier to understand.” This means emoji are more about being understood than a simple social trend---only 7 percent of the surveyed students said they use emoji “‘Because everyone else does.’” Meanwhile, 69 percent said emoji help them “express emotions.”
How these expressions are interpreted remains confusing and intriguing (hence why we gobble up new data about Instagram emoji shortly after they’re launched). The kind of angry emoji, heart emoji, or drink emoji we choose says something about how we view anger, love, and… liquor. According to the aforementioned research, these questions over interpretation are a big reason why so many of us (27 percent of the study participants) ask for help when choosing an emoji, or need help deciding what a received emoji means.
Now that Instagram, one of the most popular visual communication mediums in the online world, is allowing us to cut out words in favor of more images, understanding the meaning behind emoji just became a little more important. One group believes as much and wants to introduce the first text-to-emoji translator. Fred Benenson, the man behind Emoji Dick (an all-emoji translation of Moby Dick) is part of the team. Benenson recently translated a page from the White House big data report into emoji, a task that took him about 30 minutes:
Emoji Dick and the White House report aren’t the only emoji translations Benenson has done. “I frequently get asked to translate sentences here or there for people doing stories on them,” he tells me via email. “A lot of people have asked me to translate other books into emoji, which is part of the reason I want to build the translation engine---it'd be easy to translate any book as long as you had it in plain text format.”
The Emoji Translation Project continues to gain attention (it has about two weeks left on Kickstarter). The motivation for it came from, as so many things do, a Twitter bot. “A while ago I made a Twitter bot called @emojidreams, which tweets emoji in the form of dreams,” Berenson says. “Someone suggested that there should be an @emojidreams interpreter [side note, a human actually made @emojifreud but soon gave up], which gave me the idea of building a general purpose translation engine. It could be used anywhere for any project, and even go the other direction---from English to emoji. It turns out my friend Chris had a similar idea, so we got to work on this project.”
They're building a Google Translate, but for emoji. It might sound trivial, but the internet is changing language, and quickly. A heart emoji means different things depending on the mood, platform, sender, and recipient. More and more, these little images aren't just a decoration---they're expressing how someone really feels.
Who can even predict what this will mean someday in the distant future? 
