The Press Box - Ep. 122: 'Ringer Tech Podcast' With Molly McHugh

Episode Date: June 1, 2016

The Ringer's Molly McHugh and Kate Knibbs dedicate a full podcast to emoji with help from Fred Benenson, who translated 'Moby Dick' in its entirety into emoji, and internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, who explains why the icons have become such an important part of conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of Channel 33 is brought to you by Seekkeek, our presenting sponsor and the only fan-friendly app for buying and selling sports and music tickets. Other sites have gone back to the same old tactic of showing you a lower price and then charging huge fees at checkout. But at Seekkeek, the price you see is always the price you pay. With Seek, there's no guesswork. You'll know exactly how much you're paying, where you're sitting, and whether or not you're getting a good deal, all right from your phone. So drop your old site and experience buying and selling tickets the way it should be. To start using Seekekek, download the free Seatkeek app or go to Seekek.com. Hi, I'm Molly McHugh, and this is our yet to be named Tech Podcast. Today, I'm happy to announce you can visit Theringer.com and check out all the great content we have,

including a feature I wrote about the absolutely massive custom emoji market. Related to that, this podcast is all about emoji. I'll be talking to Fred Benenson, author of Emoji Dick. The goal of the project was an emoji translation of Herman Melville's Mother Dick. We're also talking to Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. I know the Unicode Consortium is pushing for emoji as the singular and plural. I don't think we've collectively decided. The easiest thing to do is just pluralize it the same way that you pluralize any other word in English.

But first, I'm joined by our staff writer Kate Nibs. Kate, how's it going? Hey, Molly. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Fusion is making an emoji news app. So it's like a chatbot meets emoji news, which is as much as much. trendy internet stuff as you can pack into one app. What do you think about this?

Are you going to use it? Will you read emoji news? I don't think so. I mean, some of my favorite Twitter accounts are Share and Carrie Fisher, and they both use emoji in very unique ways. And I like reading their tweets in emoji, but I don't think I'm ever going to want to read news, like where I'm translating it in my head, especially for serious news. It just seems, I don't know.

I don't ever want to read about a tragedy where I'm trying to decipher emojis to figure out who died or something like that. It just doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem like the right fit. Oh, that's terrible. The other like I guess big emoji thing, at least I saw it today or maybe yesterday was the emoji for the Bible. Please tell me more. You sent this to me. Yeah, I was reading about it because I was trying to see what books had been translated into emoji. And it turns out the holiest book has been translated to emoji.

And I saw some news clips from like Christian websites and they seemed pretty jazzed about it. But again, I mean, the same way I don't want to read my news in emoji format, I don't think I'm going to have a spiritual awakening just because they use the 100 emoji creatively while interpreting the gospel or something like that. Well, there's another very famous book that was translated into emoji. and it was a few years ago now, but Moby Dick, which have you read Moby Dick, actually? This is a great question. I have read Moby Dick. Oh, I have not. Yeah.

It's a wonderful book except for the parts where he talks about whale anatomy for an exceedingly long time. But I highly recommend reading Moby Dick. It's a wonderful novel. Yeah, so someone translated the entire book, which is a lot of book, into emoji and it's called emoji dick and that person is fred benenson and we're actually going to talk to him now i'm joined by one of the original Kickstarter employees and author of emoji dick and how to speak emoji fred benenson hey fred i'm mollie so how did you kind of enter into this world of emoji i launched emoji dick while i was like basically negotiating a job with kick starter in late 2009

And just like to briefly recap for anybody who maybe wasn't like paying attention to this, I remember it, but it was, you translated the entire book, Moby Dick into emoji, like the whole thing, right? Well, I didn't translate it. I hired people to translate it. But yeah, the goal of the project was an emoji translation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. So it was a kind of eccentric idea I had because I was poking around and mechanical talk. and I had kind of fallen in love with emoji really early on when they were only available to Japanese iPhones and my college roommate's wife is Japanese and so she she had kind of like gotten access to it earlier than the rest of us and so he was sending me emoji and I was like,

how are you doing this what's going on? So it turned out you had to like hack, you had to get this app which like basically awakened the iPhone to having emoji available and then once you had that you could send emoji to whoever you wanted. turned out it was because it was this Unicode standard. And I was like, oh, this is wild. And so those kind of like ideas kind of brood together of like, how can I kind of push emoji to the limits?

How can I push crowdsourcing to the limits? And that's kind of how I came up with emoji deck. iPhones without emoji, what a dark time. Can't even imagine. Dark age. Yeah. How long did it take you or, and, you know, everyone you were working with and to build the engine that you were using to create this thing, like from beginning to end, how long did it

take to translate it? It's something like 10,000 sentences, and the way I chose to do it made it more complicated and complex than you might think. Instead of just having one sentence done by one person, I actually had the same sentence done by multiple people. So each sentence would have three emoji translation. and I would then run those three translations against the original English and ask another set of people, which is the best emoji translation?

So I did that for all 10,000 sentences. So it was like five or six pieces of work per sentence. And I think the initial translation batch ended up taking like a week and change, like a week and a half maybe, which is not that long considering how big that book is. Yeah, I'm actually surprised. Yeah, the cool thing and the interesting part about Mechanical Turk is that you're running that work in parallel. And so I think in total I had like eight or 900 people work on that thing. And so some people did only a couple.

Other people probably did hundreds. And so by doing that work at the same time, you're kind of able to accelerate the problem. project. And so the result is this kind of like, kind of like multi-author kind of like explosion of style and taste and voice in emoji, if you could consider it possible. And, you know, I think the book is sometimes successful. Not always successful. Yeah, there's been like a lot of, you know, emoji translations really different to everybody. But can you just explain? a little bit about Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Like, I know that you're kind of, you're crowdsourcing these like small jobs out to people, but how did you like decide to use it and was it really easy to use it? I may be wrong about this, but I think Mechanical Turk was one of the earliest services that Amazon built as like a public facing web service. And now they have this like huge part of their business. I mean, it's like billions of dollars, like huge, you know, Kickstarter is entirely run on Amazon web services. But it had started off as this kind of set of things that Amazon had built internally for their

own purposes that they were kind of like opening up so that you could kind of like rent things by the hour or pay people for these small tasks. And so Mechanical Turk was originally an internal tool that Amazon used to tag products. Like, you know, here's an iron. Does it belong in the like Home and Kitchen section or like this other section? And so they built it as like a massive tagging system, but then realized that it might be useful for other people running, you know, small tasks and that kind of thing. And so everyone was kind of like amused by this and it kind of just floated around in the kind of like internet nerd world. And, you know, there's some kind of deeper ethical questions about like hiring people for, you know, these discrete tasks over the web and like how much a fair pay is.

And when you're paying somebody five cents or 10 cents to do one thing that takes three seconds, it's like suddenly all of your intuition. about like labor and like fair pay are just like out the window and you're like I don't know should I pay somebody a dollar It's it's totally weird right and so that just kind of got me thinking and interested in it and so I I just was like what is the weirdest thing I can put on mechanical Turk like you know and so before emoji dick The idea I had was To simply ask mechanical Turk workers for more mechanical Turk work projects Amazing. So meta. Yeah. And so I came up with this, like, long list. And some of them were really funny.

I don't think Translate a Book into Emoji was on there. But it definitely got me thinking of, like, other ways I could use it. And so it was kind of just in the back of my mind in the way that, like, you know, an artist might have a technique or something. I was like, one day I'll do something interesting with this thing. I mean, I remember in college, like, looking through Mechanical Turk and being like, what can I, you know, I'm a poor college kid. What can I earn five cents to do? And if I had seen, like, translate. a book into emoji, it would have been like, done deal, absolutely, sign me up. That's, do you like, is there like a shout out in the book to like all of these authors? Yeah, yeah.

I actually, a piece of fan mail or two about Mechanical Turk. I have a screenshot from some Mechanical Turk work forum where some where somebody was like, this guy, Fred seems to have some interesting tasks or something. And then I like, one or two people write me emails being like, I really enjoyed doing this. And I think it was probably because I was paying a little bit more than average. Why? But I like to think they enjoyed it. Yeah, they weren't like pressing enter 2,000 times on a screen, so it was like the most joyful day of their lives.

So to answer your question, the back of the book, there's an acknowledgement section. And I thank all the people who supported me through the Kickstarter project, but then I also individually thank all the mechanical Turk workers by their mechanical Turkwork ID, which is just like a screen of numbers. That's awesome. I love that. So they got credit. Okay? They got credit. I would look it up. If I knew I'd done that, I would absolutely be looking that up.

That's great. And yeah, we talked about this a little bit when I was telling you about the podcast, but you're tired of emoji. Or like, it's where... I'm a little concerned we're at the top of the hype cycle, but I say that every year and then it gets bigger and more and more people are cool with it and it's in more and more places. So I, you know, it's more that emoji dick was this funny thing that like a couple dozen friends and family of mine supported, and it was just this thing that I did on Kickstarter,

and it was like this proof of concept, both about, like, emoji and crowdsourcing, but also, like, Kickstarter itself. I was like, there's a cool company that enables, like, weird stuff like emoji dick to happen. Like, I want to work on. So that was kind of it until it just kind of, like, lived out on the internet by itself alone and became, like, a thing that people talked about, and people kept on buying it. And then the Library of Congress got, like, in contact. And they're like, we want to acquire it as the first emoji-only book. And I was like, whoa.

And then, like, once I publicized that, people are like, the Library of Congress is, like, accepting emoji. And then that cascaded into this whole other set of, like, yeah. And so, like. Maybe you started it. You started this, like, marketers. They're like, oh, okay, we're on board. I was, like, ashamed about doing such an insane emoji project for so long.

And now it's turned into this, like, weird side. career where I'm some kind of like emoji expert. And I think it's just the kind of thing where some part of my brain has just accidentally stumbled upon like a quirky news item like theme that continues to reward me with like random interviews and panels at like humanity's festivals. I'm just like, all right, I'm not going to fight it. Emoji Dick wasn't the end for you though. Can you tell me more about your most recent book, How to Speak Emoji? How to Speak emoji thing came out of my effort to try to build an emoji translation engine, which was ultimately unsuccessful.

Okay. I launched a Kickstarter project that didn't hit its goal, embarrassingly, especially with them, to try to raise money to buy even more mechanical Turk work so that we could create another data set so that we could train a, like, machine learning, natural language processing translation engine on, emoji to English words. And so and our sentences really. And so that was going to require at least $10,000 worth of like

work on mechanical Turk, which was like pretty expensive. And so we raised it. We launched a Kickstarter project. We didn't hit the goal. I was a little bit relieved by that. But one of the rewards was that we were going to write an emoji phrase book. And we just

kind of thought that was like kind of a funny theme to like make the project work. But I got contacted by a publisher, Eberry Press, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House, and they said, we were thinking about doing a phrase book as well. Would you want to work on this with us? And I was like, okay. And I thought about it. And I was like, sure, I'll do another book an emoji.

So, yeah. Yeah, it's got like a, you know, maybe five or six different sections, everything from like basic conversation to like emoji in the workplace to like nightlife and it's like it's like a humor book like it's a lot of the fun of the book is like punchlines of like oh that's a funny way to express this thought and emoji so I yeah it's it's done surprisingly well actually um it's sold more copies than I was expecting and it's got like really good reviews on Amazon so yeah I'm looking at it on Amazon these reviews are great everyone loves it yeah the UK Amazon one has a review where I think there's only one one star review and it's that the book is not appropriate for children.

I'll just say that that's my kind of one star review. Yeah, that's perfect. Well, okay, so one thing, when you kind of mentioned that, you know, a tipping point with emoji or something, and like you said, I think you're right. I don't think it's happening. I just think maybe people who have been more aware of it for a while are like, oh, man, we're reaching a huge saturation point. So I'm wondering if things like branded emoji and celebrity emoji packs are doing something bad maybe to emoji because, you know, like this effort by Unicode is to make something that's global and understood by everyone. And it's, it's an international kind of visual language of sorts. And so when you like insert all of these pop culture, mostly, you know, United States of origin references, are we like corrupting something?

And I don't think a lot of people know the difference between a sticker and emoji. And so I just wonder if that's going to like deteriorate at the purpose of emoji or maybe I'm like reading way too much into it. I love this topic. Okay. It's super interesting to me because, you know, as soon as I kind of wrap my head around emoji and like all the weird kind of particularities about the first set, like how much Japanese food there's in there and like which countries they left in and which ones they didn't for the first. flags and like, you know, early when it didn't support like, you know, same gender couples. Like, you're like, okay, emoji kind of has to like stretch a little bit if it's really going to be global. And Unicode was obviously thinking about this and kind of came around to it, but it made

me realize that emoji, because it's a finite set, there's this inherent tension in what it includes and what it doesn't include. And it has to be that way because it's a standard, right? Like an operating system can only support a certain number of characters. It's not. like an image where, you know, it's just getting sent across the wire and, and you're seeing what the person sent you. It's getting rendered from within the operating system. And so you're constrained to a finite list of emoji. And sure, Unicode's extending them and they made some really good choices about, you know, adding same gendered couples and skin tone and fixing and making the flag stuff work really well. But it was clear from my perspective that these are like still

going to be kind of political issues. And when you're, you know, when your food stuff of your country isn't represented in the emoji set, like, it kind of hurts. And you're like, you know, like, I can't send a dumpling to my friend. And like, it's crazy that emoji doesn't have dumplings. And it wasn't until this year that they, like, decided that they were to do that. So I always felt like they were, it was inherently political. And, and because it's baked into our operating systems, it's everywhere and so it's like very intimately political in this really interesting way

and Unicode obviously realized this too and you know from all appearances they're not like entirely comfortable being in the hot seat trying to decide what the next batch of emoji are because you know they can only suggest so many and like you know like Dorex

is trying to get them to a condom emoji and you're like well it makes sense to have a condom emoji but like you know like that's that's super And so Unicode is now saying, you know, this isn't sustainable. Like we're going to be adding like at this rate like 60 emoji a year and that's fine, but like it's starting to get really hard to organize them. Like, you know, there are all these other issues.

The future is going to be something like inline images that just work across operating systems and like, you know, you'll be able to buy your sticker packs or get your celebrity emoji or like whatever and then like you're simply sending an image instead of like a text-based character which then gets rendered. Part of me gets really sad about that because it's like you're losing the standardization that makes emoji so great and it actually makes emoji kind of like a little insulated from all the brand stuff. So no matter how much, you know, Kim Kardashian wants to make her emoji, Unico's never going to accept that. Yeah, yeah. She has to have come up with this hack, which is fine for the most case, but like the true emoji set stays

sure, you know? And their guidelines for criteria are actually like, I think, really reasonable. And so like, I just, I want that to work a little bit longer. I think we have a little bit longer. Not forever. And listen, it's really, it's really rough when Unicode's like, we're not going to, like, you know,

this is not the way forward. You know, they're even that, they're like, totally. Yeah, I'm sure they're just Unicode is so overwhelmed with petitions to make something an emoji at this point. that whoever has the job of like sifting through that first letter. I'm very sorry for. But yeah, thanks so much for kind of running me through this. I know you talk about emoji

constantly, but I always find it really fascinating. So I appreciate it. No problem. Yeah, I mean, I will say that I'm working on an emoji conference that's going to be happening in San Francisco in November. So, you know, we'll have more info about that. Yeah, keep me up to date. Yeah, yeah. All right. Thanks so much to Fred Benenson. You can find more of his work at Fred Benenson. I cannot believe that he was able to find 10 or enough people to translate 10,000 sentences into emoji. I'm fascinated by the fact that he didn't have everything translated once and he had it translated several times. I'd be interested to see, you know, the non-canon emoji dick and how different people's translations were.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of my, one of my favorite parts about talking to Fred about this is I didn't realize that he had used mechanical Turk to get all of the translations. I would love that mechanical Turk job. And I think it's so cool how he like, thanks all the people who have done this. And how many people, I would, you know, because their translations all have to be super different. So if you like read one chapter to the next, I mean, like, I guess you couldn't really. This book might make, I mean, it doesn't make any sense, just reading it straight through. But I don't know. That's pretty cool.

It's one of the more creative uses for Mechanical Turk I've ever heard of for sure. I've always been trying, I've been interested in using Mechanical Turk, but I haven't thought of a project that I want to put random people through. Have you ever used it? No, I haven't. And I wish I were working on something cool enough. I would be interested in seeing how someone translated the ringer into emoji. Oh, new project. Yeah.

Hopefully they'll have fun with it. But so the one thing I, and I think I asked for it a little bit about this, is that he did this a while ago back when we were like still kind of like, oh, wow, what is this cool new thing on our keyboards? And now it's like, have we reached peak emoji? Like if we translate some giant book into emoji, are we all going to be bored with it and just like, oh, please, that's enough. I mean, I would be interested to see what Moby Dick would look like.

translated into celebrity apps, like Kimoji dick or something. Oh, God. But, I mean, I would probably only read the first chapter. I don't know if Kim Kardashian has ever imagined that her emojis would be used to say, call me Ishmael. I mean, she's missing the whale, so it'd be really difficult. Maybe she'll do an update. Oh, God, we can only hope.

But so one person who is still, you know, regardless of peak emoji, totally. invested into this is Gretchen McCulloch, who she continues to study them. She's been studying an emoji for a while and just internet lingo in general. But I talked to her recently and she had some really interesting things to say about like peak emoji and where emoji are going. So yeah, let's talk to her really quick. Now I'm joined by Gretchen McCulloch who studies the internet and how we speak on it. Hey, Gretchen, can you kind of just like give me your official job title? My name is Gretchen McCullick and I'm an internet. linguist. As an internet linguist, I want to start off asking you, is it emoji or emojis?

That's a use that's in flux right now. I don't think we've collectively decided. I know the Unicode Consortium is pushing for emoji as the singular and plural. So when a word gets borrowed into English, right? So emoji comes from Japanese. And when a word gets borrowed into English, the easiest thing to do is just pluralize it the same way that you'd pluralize any other word in English. But sometimes people either try to pluralize it the way that you would pluralize it in the original language. So in the case of Latin words that get pluralized like Latin, because for a long time so much of the population was relatively fluent in Latin, or just not give it an official plural and just have it be invariant from singular to plural. I mean, English has a few words that do this, like sheep.

Right, or deer or something. Or deer, but not a whole lot. There are other words like sushi where we've borrowed them and the plural is invariant, but really sushi is a mass noun, so it's not quite the same thing. So emoji, I think that we'll have to collectively decide this over the next five or ten years, and it's not fully settled. So I myself am inconsistent in my usage, which is like the worst thing. because ideally people try to be consistent, whatever you're going to do.

But I'm inconsistent. I haven't decided yet. Okay, okay. We talked about it briefly as we're putting together a style guide, and I was very like, emoji, emoji, there is no emojis. It's only emoji. So I really hope I'm not wrong and I don't have to change this in like six months or something. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the one that the Inicode Consortium prefers, so you can

at least cite them. But, like, governing bodies don't generally actually work when it comes to language. Like, people just do what they want. So I would say, you know, stay on the internet, keep your finger on the pulse of what people are doing. And if need be, you change it because language changes, you know. So stressful. I wanted to know a little bit about how you worked with Swift Key on emoji stuff because that's kind of where my interest in internet language started. Yeah.

So Swiftke sent me an email last summer and they said, you know, hi, we're this, you know. emoji keyboard company. This smartphone keyboard company and we want to put together a presentation for South by Southwest about emoji because we have all this data and we'd like to have a linguist on board to analyze, you know, to ask us more interesting questions about it. Because at the time, so they'd done a lot of stuff about, you know, people in this country or with this language preference set, use this emoji more. And that had gotten a lot of press from them.

And they were working on their United States of emoji. So people in this state used this emoji more. And that got some press as well. And they loved that. I love that. I love that PDF so much. And they thought, well, you know, I'm sure there are other interesting questions that we could be asking of all this data. And we don't, you know, we want some more ideas of stuff that it could do. And I think, and so, you know, I'm, I'm an internet linguist, so surely I can come up with questions. And I was really excited to work with them because they have access to this huge data set of emoji. And I didn't, you know, I didn't get access to the data directly because that's got privacy issue. So we were doing it all like one step removed.

Everything was anonymized. Everything was an aggregate. You know, like it doesn't tell us anything about your personal text to know that a lot of people use tears of joy. Sure. So it was very, very mass. Still most popular emoji. Still the most popular. Good for face of tears of joy.

In fact, the most popular three emoji sequences are number one, tears of joy, tears of joy, number two, tears of joy, tears of joy, tears of joy, tears of joy, tears of joy. And number three, tears of joy, tears of joy, tears of joy. So that's two times, three times and four times. Oh, my God. I love it. But, well, people use it like laughter, and it's pretty weird to laugh with just one ha. True. You're right. That's a good point.

So is there any, like, is there anything you've discovered recently that you're just like, oh, my God, new weird language thing that I have found. and I need to understand that I will probably hear about in like, I don't know, seven months or eight months or something. Yeah. I mean, I've been looking at small for a while, SMOL. I just, I have no idea what that is. And I spend so much time on the internet. So it's a variation on small.

Okay. But people use it in kind of a non-literal sense, like in a cute sort of way or attractive. sort of way. I wrote an article on it for Mental Floss a little while back. And so when I searched for it on Twitter just to see where people were using it the most beyond just whoever happens to be on my Tumblr dash, it seemed to be really common around members of the One Direction fandom. Okay. So people use it. There's a very influential internet group. It's a very influential internet group. A lot of them have tons and tons of followers. When you go to find One Direction fans to quote, they'll be like, oh yeah, this person has 75,000 followers and they're a member of the One Direction fan. Wow. And so they were using it to talk about the big ship, like the big relationship that people talk about if they're One Direction fans is Harry and Louis, Lewis. Oh, God. And one of them, I forget who I am not actually a One Direction fan, is shorter than the other. And so he's the small.

one and the other one is the tall one, S-M-O-L and T-O-L. So you can say it's like kind of small and toll, just a slight difference from small and tall. And it's like a cuter way of saying it. That's great. I like it. I mean, I guess the other thing is, to what extent is internet culture just going to become culture? No, that's totally true.

But it's happening so fast that it's just like fascinating to hear more about. Yeah. Thanks so much to Gretchen for talking to us. If you want to read more about all the cool studies Gretchen's working on, you can head to Gretchenmachalick.com. Okay, Kate, do you think you could ever do Gretchen's job, like full-time analyzing Internet speak and emoji? I think her job sounds fascinating and I would be terrible at it because I don't have. I couldn't be a linguist in any way, shape, or form unless I went back to school and probably got a new brain. But I'm happy she's doing it.

Would you ever become an internet linguist? I would love to you, but I do. Like, she's so invested in things that I think I read a ton of internet. Like, I'm always on the internet. And when she's telling me some of these things, like small and tall, and I'm just sitting there like, I have never heard of this. Me neither, but I'm going to, I might test it out on my younger siblings and see if they think I'm cool. Okay.

Kate, I'm going to put you on the spot. And when you pull up text, what's your, what's under frequently used emoji? I use the wine emoji a lot in communicating with my mother. I've been trying to make squirrel emoji happen. I haven't really figured out what I'm even intending when I send it to people, but I think it's really funny to send like 15 squirrel emoji in a row to my friends. And I'm like, figure it out, man. Do you have any celebrity emoji packs, though?

This is perhaps more telling than you're recently used even. Okay, I do, but in my defense, I thought I was going to write about them at some point. So I have Kimoji, which I use frequently. And then I have Amber Rose's emoji pack, which I use less frequently because it's kind of annoying to use. Yeah, switching between keyboards is awful. Yeah. I don't have the future ones, but I'm considering getting them. Do you have any others?

I have Kimoji and I downloaded Amber Rose's emoji, but I haven't, I think I like uninstalled it and I haven't put it back in yet. And then I did download Black China's emoji because it's the newest and I had to check it out. I mean, they're not terribly expensive, but okay, this is going to sound so cheap. But $1.99 adds up and I'm just not going to be able to download every celebrity back in the world. it's just not going to happen. So I think I might be done. Like I think I have enough non-em emoji emoji. Yeah.

Kate, thank you for talking to me about emoji all day. This is how I wish I could spend most of my days. Yep. All right. Well, cool. Well, thank you for listening. And we'll be back with another episode soon. Bye, guys.