Introduction to Emoji Data Science. By Hamdan Azhar. Presented on Nov. 3, 2017 at Open Data Science Conference in San Francisco.

1. Hamdan Azhar
hamdan@prismoji.com
@hamdanazhar
// November 3, 2017
From data with ❤ //
An introduction to Emoji Data Science

2. 🏭 📈📊%
à
& 📈📊%
Industry data science -> Indie data science

9. While emojis might seem fun and
trivial, they are at their core vessels
for conveying human emotion.
Emojis are also data.
And data science can help us
understand them.

10. The birth of

12. My reaction to this article,
in emoji

13. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-emojis-of-great-brexit

14. How do people use emojis to react to a major
political event in real time?

15. Getting the data
■ Use Twitter API to sample 100,000 tweets for five hashtags related to Britain’s
EU Referendum
§ Hashtags: #NotMyVote, #VoteRemain, #EURef, #Brexit, #VoteLeave
§ Data pulled for June 24, 2016 (the day after the referendum)
§ English language tweets only
§ After removing retweets, we’re left with 23,989 unique tweets, i.e. the “Brexit
dataset”
§ Of these, 1,505 tweets (6.3%) contain at least one emoji

16. Analyzing the data
§ Use regular expressions in R, along with Unicode emoji dictionaries, to
extract emojis from tweets
§ Compute emoji counts in the Brexit dataset
§ Compare with counts for all >10B emoji tweets on Twitter since 2013
(from emojitracker.com)
§ Extract hashtags from tweets and compute hashtag profiles for various
emojis

17. emoji emoji name brexit rank brexit count
brexit density
(per 1,000)
😂 face with tears of joy 1 285 11.9
flag of united kingdom 2 249 10.4
👍 thumbs up sign 3 75 3.1
👏 clapping hands sign 4 70 2.9
❤ heavy black heart 5 60 2.5
😭 loudly crying face 6 48 2.0
😔 pensive face 7 40 1.7
😩 weary face 8 38 1.6
😢 crying face 9 34 1.4
🙈 see-no-evil monkey 10 34 1.4
Brexit chatter includes a wide variety of emojis
Of every
1,000 tweets
in our
dataset, 11.9
of them
contain 😂

19. Can we use hashtag data to understand what
these emojis mean?

20. Finding the “hashtag signature” of a given emoji
§ We know the distribution of
hashtags in our entire dataset
§ We can pick a given emoji and
compute the distribution of
hashtags for tweets that use that
emoji
§ By comparing these two
distributions, we can estimate
which hashtags an emoji is most
likely to be used with
15%
17%
20%
29%
19%

22. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a-data-scientists-emoji-guide-to-kanye-west-and-taylor-swift

23. Hearts vs. Snakes:
The emoji battle underyling the epic Taylor Swift – Kanye West feud
Source: Analysis of 100,000
public tweets mentioning
@taylorswift13 and
@kanyewest from
Aug. 1-4, 2016.
(PRISMOJI)

24. Taylor Swift is winning hearts (and minds)
Source: Analysis of 100,000
public tweets mentioning
@taylorswift13 and
@kanyewest from
Aug. 1-4, 2016.
(PRISMOJI)
equal
higher association with
@taylorswift13
higher association with
@kanyewest

25. Our common emoji language of #fanlove
Source: Analysis of 250,000
public tweets mentioning
@beyonce, @justinbieber,
@djkhaled, @drake, and
@rihanna from
Aug. 1-4, 2016.
(PRISMOJI)

26. Sometimes love hurts
Examples of in tweets involving #fanlove
Source: Analysis of 250,000
public tweets mentioning
@beyonce, @justinbieber,
@djkhaled, @drake, and
@rihanna from
Aug. 1-4, 2016.
(PRISMOJI)

27. Now let’s turn to something more serious

28. Emoji reactions to Election Night results
Source: Analysis of sampled
Election Night tweets,
from Nov. 9, 2016 12:00am –
3:30am EST.
(PRISMOJI)
More common in tweets mentioning TrumpMore common in tweets mentioning Clinton
https://prismoji.com/2016/11/26/the-top-emojis-of-election-day-2016/

29. Election Day emojis in tweets mentioning Hillary Clinton
More common AFTER midnightMore common BEFORE midnight
Source: Analysis of sampled
Election Day tweets from
Nov. 8, 2016 6:00am to
Nov. 9, 2016 3:30am.
(PRISMOJI)

30. Source: Analysis of sampled Election Day tweets from Nov. 8, 2016. (PRISMOJI)

31. The divided emoji states of America
Source: Analysis of sampled Election Night tweets, from Nov. 9, 2016 12:00am – 3:30am EST. Word clouds shown for tweets mentioning Hillary Clinton
or Donald Trump as well as the given emoji above. Randomly selected tweet shown for each emoji.

32. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/raised-fist-emoji-resistance_us_5899e39fe4b09bd304bd8ac9

34. Emojis of the resistance
#NoBanNoWall
#TheResistance
#NotMyPresident
#WomensMarch
Source: Analysis of
sampled English-
language tweets
from Jan. 28-29,
2017 (Emojipedia)

35. The media doesn’t always appreciate emojis

36. 36

37. 37

38. 38

39. Latest work

40. The Top Emojis of #MeToo
Source: Analysis of 28,629 English-language tweets sampled on Oct. 16, 2017 using
the Twitter Search API. Top 10 emojis shown in descending order of frequency.

41. The Top Emojis of #MeToo
Source: Analysis of 28,629 English-language tweets sampled on Oct. 16, 2017 using
the Twitter Search API. Top 20 emojis shown, grouped by emoji type, in descending
order of frequency.
❤💔💜💕💖💙💛💗
😔😢😡😍😞😕😥
👇✊💪🙏👏

42. The Top Emojis of #MeToo: Skin Tone Distributions
Source: Analysis of 28,629 English-language tweets sampled on Oct. 16, 2017 using the Twitter Search API.
Color 1 Color 2 Color 3 Color 4 Color 5
Mean
Skin Tone
✊ 9% 37% 29% 14% 11% 2.8
👇 29% 29% 18% 12% 12% 2.5
🙏 20% 50% 15% 15% 0% 2.2
💪 38% 28% 25% 9% 0% 2.0
👊 50% 25% 25% 0% 0% 1.8
🖕 50% 36% 14% 0% 0% 1.6
For emojis that are
most frequently used
with skin tone
modifiers, we look at
the distribution of skin
tone usage for each
emoji. The yellow
band indicates the
”mean skin tone” for a
given emoji.

43. While emojis might seem fun and
trivial, they are at their core vessels
for conveying human emotion.
Emojis are also data.
And data science can help us
understand them.

44. You too can become an emoji data scientist!
https://prismoji.com/2017/02/06/emoji-data-science-in-r-tutorial/

45. Mailchimp emoji analysis
https://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimps-most-popular-subject-line-emojis/

46. Spotify emoji analysis
https://insights.spotify.com/us/2017/05/02/spotify-emoji-music/

47. Next steps
■ Journalism vs. Academic & Industry
■ Study emoji usage across countries & cultures
■ Study private emoji usage vs. public emoji usage
■ Using this as a kick-off point to dive head-in into data
journalism and storytelling about unexplored questions in
society and culture

48. Thank you!
Send me questions and tips! Or reach out if you’d like to
collaborate J
On Twitter: @hamdanazhar
Or by email: hamdan@prismoji.com
Check out more emoji data science at prismoji.com