Of greater note is how gender does and doesn’t come into play: if you’re a conservative male journalist you really adhere to notions that say emoji-aren’t-for-you. If you’re a celebrity male, you’re perfectly happy using oodles of emoji, as with Snoop Dogg, Kyle MacLachlan, DJ Khaled, William Shatner, Diplo, and Chad Johnson.

Tyler Schnoebelen, who gave the keynote speech on Monday, says conversations about emoji have been too often painted with a broad brush. There’s the utopian vision: emoji as a "universal language," the great democratizer and harbinger of communication across class, culture, and geography. And then there’s the doomsday vision: emoji as the destruction of language, a political tool, a new way to send violent threats. The nuance often gets lost in between. We have hardly any research to tell us who uses emoji, when, why, and how that use has changed over time. We know even less about what emoji can reveal in disaster scenarios, campaigns, or educational settings; even linguists, who have looked at emoticons and other internet-born languages for decades, don't have a consensus on what emoji mean for the future of language.

Outside of emoji researchers, lots of people still forecast disaster or dream of universal communication even if most of us are confident that neither is nigh. Despite our protests, emoji inspire visions of apocalypse and utopia.

As with many linguistic resources (sounds, words, syntax), people use emoji to grind all sorts of axes. For example, people who say that women use more emoji than men are usually making some point that the data don't support. The first step in such an analysis is to ignore or discount the fact that, say, Snoop Dogg and Kyle MacLachlan are among the biggest emoji users in the world.

In this talk, I'll demonstrate how ideologies of emoji work themselves out across 870 journalists that political scientists have separately scored as liberal, conservative, or centrist. This lets us compare objective vs. subjective stances and inverts the idea that gender explains emoji to show how it is that emoji are a way that people "do" gender differently based on their political commitments.

Of greater note is how gender does and doesn’t come into play: if you’re a conservative male journalist you really adhere to notions that say emoji-aren’t-for-you. If you’re a celebrity male, you’re perfectly happy using oodles of emoji, as with Snoop Dogg, Kyle MacLachlan, DJ Khaled, William Shatner, Diplo, and Chad Johnson.

Outside of emoji researchers, lots of people still forecast disaster or dream of universal communication even if most of us are confident that neither is nigh. Despite our protests, emoji inspire visions of apocalypse and utopia.

As with many linguistic resources (sounds, words, syntax), people use emoji to grind all sorts of axes. For example, people who say that women use more emoji than men are usually making some point that the data don't support. The first step in such an analysis is to ignore or discount the fact that, say, Snoop Dogg and Kyle MacLachlan are among the biggest emoji users in the world.

In this talk, I'll demonstrate how ideologies of emoji work themselves out across 870 journalists that political scientists have separately scored as liberal, conservative, or centrist. This lets us compare objective vs. subjective stances and inverts the idea that gender explains emoji to show how it is that emoji are a way that people "do" gender differently based on their political commitments.

Pew studies have shown that although there are more white people on Twitter, black people are more likely to be active on the platform. White people don't generally default for paler emojis because, as linguist and emoticon researcher Tyler Schnoebelen tells the Atlantic, “they’re kind of represented by the default anyway.”

If you follow politics in America even a little bit, you know that Republicans talk a lot about taxes and that Donald Trump loves the word tremendous. But how do these rank relative to each other and to what Democrats (and Hillary Clinton, in particular) tend to talk about? Well, one finding is that over the years, Republican candidates have been even more preoccupied with Hillary Clinton than they have been with Ronald Reagan. Another finding is that the debates for the current election have been ~157% more negative than all previous debates.

You can get pretty far in text classification just by treating documents as bags of words where word order doesn’t matter. So you’d treat “It’s not reliable and it’s not cheap” the same as “It’s cheap and it’s not not reliable”, even though the first is an strong indictment and the second is a qualified recommendation. Surely it’s dangerous to ignore the ways words come together to make meaning, right?

Donald Trump isn’t “there yet” in supporting Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Ryan has repeatedly chastised Trump and famously said he wasn’t there yet on Trump earlier this year. How strong is his distaste? Did he (and his writers) overcome it at the RNC Convention?

Of greater note is how gender does and doesn’t come into play: if you’re a conservative male journalist you really adhere to notions that say emoji-aren’t-for-you. If you’re a celebrity male, you’re perfectly happy using oodles of emoji, as with Snoop Dogg, Kyle MacLachlan, DJ Khaled, William Shatner, Diplo, and Chad Johnson.

Tldr: gender doesn’t make for good soundbites if you’re doing it right.

Here’s a headline from Politico that is counter-intuitive, aggravating, and compelling: Donald Trump talks like a woman. I’d like to speak out on behalf of a bunch of linguists who say KNOCK IT OFF.

I’ve been vaguely obsessed by Donald Trump’s use of believe me. How does he use it? How should we interpret it? In pursuing these questions, we’ll see how much more he uses believe me than everyone else and how he puts it in a different place than everyone else, too.