Introducing Dewmoji

A joke on Twitter got me thinking—can we find an emoji for all Dewey/MDS classes.

It was easy to add. Check it out here: http://www.librarything.com/mds/592

The emojis are added at the bottom, with the language.

Don't start screaming. I'll give this a week or so of prominence, and then make it an opt-in option.

Interesting. No screaming here.

Wish we could swipe some of the sprites from SimEarth.

That's the first thing this made me think of.

1. Find emoji. (under appropriate license)
2. Highlight emoji.
3. Copy (Ctrl-c for most)
4. Paste into new field for emoji (Ctrl-v for most) -- ETA: field is at bottom of page for each Dewey category.
5. Yay!

Question: how will we wangle the license issues? EmojiOne, for example, is CC-Attribution. Where/how do we attribute? (http://emojione.com/licensing/)

I use Emojipedia http://emojipedia.org

There are no real licensing issues. They display in the browser. We're not going to sell them…

I'm rather proud of:

Wording: Philosophy And Psychology > Ethics > Temperance
Dewmoji: 💭 > 🚎 > 🍸
http://www.librarything.com/mds/178

Trolley chosen for the various "trolley problems" in ethics.

You can search for topics here:
https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=test&searchtype=17&search...

I know, I know. It's not as though I made that stuff up, though... :-/
Just wanted to point out the question. Pretty sure a line on the sitewide licensing statement for each source should suffice for legal ass-coverage, so might be worth considering. Though, if it's "damn the torpedoes," I'll happy run with that as well. :-)

Wording: Arts And Leisure > Amusements and Recreation > Stage Entertainments > Mime
Dewmoji: 🎨 > ⚽ > 🎭 > 😶

Wording: Social Sciences > Economics > Finance > Money > Deflation, Inflation, And Price Stability
Dewmoji: 👫 > 🐂 > 💰 > 👛 > 💸

Might swap in a bill for the purse. Was hoping for coins, but no luck.

ETA: Right. Now it's:
👫 > 🐂 > 💰 > 💵 > 💸

Didn't realize how far behind the times I was, and that so many of these are already in Unicode; it's just the renderings that are copyrighted. Can you tell I don't use a smartphone?

Here's the whole list from the source. http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
Less browsable, but potentially more discoverable. And from the dates, you can see it was 2010 when this process really got cooking.

And here's Dewey, 11th edition, 1922, in case anyone wants to add additional detail. https://archive.org/details/deweydecimal11dewe

Found myself having to cheat just a bit by recourse to the more general Unicode characters: https://www.key-shortcut.com/en/writing-systems/symbols/symbols-typography-techn...

Things like Ⓐ, ☭, ☰, etc. But feel free to purge them if we're being purists here. ;-)

Just no emoji in talk. PLEASE

>1 timspalding: Opt-in is horrible in general. These are completely harmless; let people turn them off if they want. But the vast majority of people will never even find an opt-in feature.

>17 gilroy: Prefer no emoji anywhere. Words still work just fine for me.

It's fun for a while, but there are so many gaps in the emoji system that it gets frustrating. Why is there no fitting emoji for 846, for instance (Wording: Literature > French > French letters)...?

>19 Taphophile13: I'm with you.

>20 thorold:

Add it!

Don't worry people, I think it's silly. But it's fun-silly. Someone on a librarian group suggested it could be used to label books for English-language learners. No!

>22 timspalding:
I should Google before posting comments like that: it turns out that there is a campaign going on to get the appropriate emoji added to the system. A campaign sponsored out of pure and altruistic motives by a well-known rubber products company...

Wording: Biography And History > Pacific > Isolated Islands > Easter Island
Dewmoji: ⌛ > 🗿 > 🗿 > 🗿

Hey guys, remember (or know) that all the ones that have skin color have variants. I just replaced the praying-hands with a browner one, for example.

>19 Taphophile13: I'm with the please, no emoji things anywhere. I really like words. I have books, and they have words in them. I don't do text-speak either.

Let's see if we can't get the first two levels?

Whoever chose this is a genius:

Wording: Literature > German > German wit and humor
Dewmoji: 📚 > 🇩🇪 > 🚫

Incidentally, you can use the search page to find things like "humor" or "essays" and just do them all. For example, I've made essays be 📄 everywhere, and humor is 😂, except for I kept German the way it was.

>28 timspalding: Ok, I laughed!

>28 timspalding: That is really not funny.

I think you need to change it and appologize to all German speakers on LT.

>31 MarthaJeanne:

Go ahead and change it!

I agree with the "no emojis" crowd. Definitely make this "opt-in" if you do it.

I am not a fan of emojis.

>31 MarthaJeanne:

Touché to your edit.

>33 lilithcat: As should be evident from my comments above, I've been studiously ignoring emojis myself. This is really fun, though. :-D Agree it should be an optional feature.

Here's the scholarly vein we're tapping into, if it makes you feel any better.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11477

Have some touchstones, too. Semantography / The Search for the Perfect Language / In the Land of Invented Languages.

And remember, as the comments on the LanguageLog piece remind us: emoji are meant to convey emotions -- "complex emotions like laughing so hard you're crying… and you're a cat."
😹

>20 thorold: see >16 davidgn:
And I fixed it.
Wording: Literature > French > French letters
Dewmoji: 📚 > 🇫🇷 > ô

Well, except that "letters" means "literature."

🙊
ETA

Hey, I'm not the one who chose ô!

>39 timspalding: All the other accented French characters I could think of also have heavy use in other major languages. Got a better idea?

Meh. I might just go with the pile of books…

My one rule has been never to have two of the same icon on the same row--so every Dewmoji is distinct.

I'm tempted to make all South America classes use 🍠 (sweet potato). It's the only explicitly South American thing I can find—no llamas, alpacas, etc.

Anyone got a better idea?

Also, North America?

How about ⚾?

Someone used corn for North America. I think that fits.
ETA: 🌽

⚾ is now also very Japanese!

Maybe. But corn is more central American… Hmm.

>37 timspalding: Tim, you're humor-impaired today.

>28 timspalding: Guilty! (and yes, I am a German-speaker and I've quite a few works of German humour in my library)

>37 timspalding: From the context, I guess that "letters" in Dewey really means published correspondence. ("French letter" is archaic British slang for a condom, BTW, in case I baffled anyone yesterday).

>43 davidgn: Most of the "American" things in emoji seem to be interchangeable between North, South and Central. I thought about "Man in cowboy hat" for North, but that doesn't seem to be generally supported.

I'd never really looked at emoji before, but when you do try to use them, it becomes painfully obvious that if they do form a language, it's a language designed exclusively to meet the chatting requirements of Asian pre-teens. Lots of icons for consumption and for positive emotions and inclusiveness, but very little that you can use to describe anything bad in the world, or to express any kind of critical thought. Nothing political or military, only a few external signs of religion, nothing that refers to any time period earlier than "now". In fact, it's looking very like a more colourful version of Newspeak.

>47 thorold: The Germans do tend to react badly to the wittiest among them these days, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2e2yHjc_mc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair

>47 thorold: And about emoji, you really have a point there. It gets me to thinking: Tim, if we get this nailed down, how about we try Blissymbolics next? That's actually used (ETA: in a serious manner), and it might really be helpful. ;-) http://www.blissymbolics.org/index.php/why-is-bliss-used

ETA: And it looks like RadioLab did a piece on Bliss and his system. Ought to be worth a listen! I'm listening now.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/

ETA: I can't say I've ever studied the system, but I have spent some time working with disabled people, which is how I first became aware of its existence. Here's a simple primer, 8 pages: http://www.crockford.com/blissym/lesson1.pdf

>47 thorold: In fact, it's looking very like a more colourful version of Newspeak.
You may find Bliss symbols all the more interesting on the account that it was created by a concentration camp survivor who abhorred the ability of political propagandists to subvert the meaning of spoken language.

ETA: Update Probably not practical to include anytime soon, but Blisssymbolics is slated for inclusion in Unicode at some future point. http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/
I might start squeaking my wheel about this a few years down the line. ;-)

>37 timspalding: Sure about that?

http://da.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=french%20letter

(Not sure I can find a SFW emoji for that, though :-)

I'm just seeing squares. Not that I want to see silly faces anyway.

>52 reading_fox: If you're using a sufficiently out-of-date operating system, that's what I would expect you to see. The emoji support has really only been around for the past five years, with subsets periodically added. In fact, some of the emoji I added aren't slated to be supported until later this year.

>53 davidgn: - win7/chrome (Version 38.0.2125.101 m). Not exactly out of date.

>54 reading_fox: Is the Win7 fully updated? http://blog.getemoji.com/post/82224498347/how-to-use-emoji-in-windows-7

NB the following claim:
http://blog.getemoji.com/post/57054354336/which-browsers-support-emoji
"If using Windows 7, Windows Vista, or any other early version of Windows, you will not see Emoji correctly in any browser."
Nonetheless, I think adding all the latest patches will correct this on 7, but I can't be certain.

I've been cutting-and-pasting from emojipedia, but that's clunky. What's the better way to input? Emoji colon syntax or Unicode?

Cutting and pasting is the only way I know how. The colon syntax won't work, I don't think.

>49 davidgn: That's actually used (ETA: in a serious manner),

Emoji is used in a serious manner by hundreds of millions of people as part of their everyday life.

>40 davidgn:

Well emojipedia says that there isn't an emoji of a condom so I have nothing.

>50 bnielsen:
French letter (using that definition) was more or less a standard British usage at one time. It wasn't restricted to the war.

I'm doing the 970s right now. Fair warning! :-p

>59 andyl: In Danish (at least Danish at one time) "Franske postkort" meant pornographic pictures and Franskmand could also mean condom.

>50 bnielsen: >59 andyl: ...and, to remind us of the entente cordiale, the French call them capotes anglaises.

I put my foot down on one. Dewey is REALLY Christian centered, but the top-level religion category was changed to ✝ from 🙏🏽. I changed it back to 🙏🏽.

What do people think about doubles?

https://www.librarything.com/mds/143

Melvil Decimal System: 143
Wording: Philosophy And Psychology > Philosophical Systems > Magic
Dewmoji: 💭 > 💬 > 🎩🐰

I say no, right?

It's an interesting question. I'm tickled by the idea of adding another level of agglutination, but I also see the risk of it devolving.

Yeah, I think we have to stick with it. Also, the hat is enough.

Melvil Decimal System: 641.5753

Wording: Technology > Home Economics > Food And Drink > Cooking > Cooking, Specialized Locations > Cooking on the Go > Cooking on Boats, Ships

Dewmoji: 💡 > 🏠 > 🍴 > 🍳 > 🌴 > 🏃 > 🚢

>66 timspalding: When I first saw it, it was just the rabbit. And I laughed out loud. Hard to say which should go.

As for Religion, the other candidate I see is U+1F6D0 🛐 "Place of Worship" -- though that's not yet supported by most platforms; particularly, Microsoft says "Summer '16" for Unicode 9.0 support.

Any chance we can get a dashboard to show us what's not been set yet?

>69 aethercowboy:

Yeah, later. I'll try to make a page of them.

Poke around. There are lots that aren't set.

Why does T mean periodicals?

>71 timspalding: Period of time = T
I expect the physicist and engineer types will like it.

ETA: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/pend.html

I'm kind of proud of

Melvil Decimal System: 306.762

Wording: Social Sciences > Social Sciences, Sociology, Anthropology > Culture and Institutions > Sexuality > Sexual orientation, gender identity > Eunuchs, castrati
Dewmoji: 👫 > 👭 > 🎏 > 🍑 > ? > 🔪

But we need an emoji for gender orientation/identity

>73 timspalding:

It's a pity you don't support FontAwesome, they have a few. http://fontawesome.io/icons/

Xah Lee to the rescue. http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_sex_symbols.html

We need a Canadian or two for 971.x . I've done the major provinces, but the rest I can't do justice.
(And someone probably needs to smack me for 971.1 :-p)

Can whoever keeps replacing the Milky Way for Astronomy with a ridiculous-looking cartoon shooting star please explain why?

You can look in the history…

Personally, I prefer the telescope for that. The Milky Way is too hard to recognize.

>77 lorax:

Huh. I did the star, and you replaced it with the Milky Way. Unless it was somewhere else.

>79 timspalding:

I'm talking about 523; I agree with the telescope for 52x. I'll admit that as a former astronomer I'm totally biased toward actual astronomical objects for the category on actual astronomical objects, rather than things that are in the atmosphere of the earth and that last a few seconds, pretty though meteors may be. The Milky Way one isn't ideal - I'd prefer a spiral galaxy, or the planet Saturn, or something - but at least it's not wrong.

>80 lorax: You might find these helpful, if you want to dip further into Unicode . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_symbols

This is very frustrating: it's the first LT time-sink that only works on my home PC and not at the office. I hope this isn't a new trend...

I had a go at some philosophers, but didn't get far. Locke and Bacon were easy, but I couldn't find anything better than a happy face for Mill (it should be great number of greatly happy faces, shouldn't it?). And there must be something better for Hume than an Enquiry-mark.

>64 timspalding: A practicing non-stage-magic Magician and widow of the dude who wrote Real Magic, I'm not to crazy about bunnies and hats. No wands available? Or is that category only for stage magic?

>83 PhaedraB:

Yeah, the bunny and hat don't suit the philosophical system. There's another category by games and recreations where they belong. This one needs a pentacle or an Enochian letter Un.

>83 PhaedraB:, >84 paradoxosalpha:
Except look what books are actually categorized under it. Nothing on ceremonial magic of the sort you have in mind.

ETA: You want 133.43. http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?owi=561360

ETA: And while I was Dee-lighted to check for you, Enochian still isn't in Unicode. I put a pentagram on 133.4, though. Hope that works.

>85 davidgn: look what books are actually categorized under it

How? (I can't navigate MDS south of 14X, it seems.) For the record, what I have in mind are books like these:

Eros and Magic in the Renaissance
Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella
Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Theses
Giordano Bruno: Cause, Principle and Unity

Here's the breakdown of Dewey numbers under which each of those have actually been categorized:

http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?owi=2830037277
http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?owi=1618206
http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?owi=223254878
http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?owi=2829741876

As you'll see, wide variation between titles and, to a lesser extent, in the range of cataloging determinations made by various libraries for each of the titles.

As for the titles (ETA: in the LT catalog) under 143, go here: http://www.librarything.com/mds/143
And scroll down to "Works under MDS 143"

Out of curiosity, why is "Modern Western Philosophy" (19X) a cigarette?

(Also, kudos to Tim for choosing a dark-skinned woman as the generic person for the "Biography" division (92X).)

>88 lorax:

Perhaps a flip reference to existensialism, or in any case its caricature?

>87 davidgn: "Works under MDS 143"

Those titles look like they were classified by idiots. There's nary a theme in common, and maybe one in twelve might arguably fall somewhere under "philosophical systems." I'll stop caring about MDS at all now.

>90 paradoxosalpha: 143 seems to be a disused corner of DDC/MDS into which various cruft has intruded. The system as a whole still works -- sort of -- in its archaic, shambolic way. (This is one of many reasons why LCC is so much less objectionable. Also: can't those Brits hurry up and finish BC2 so there's a chance it might catch on Stateside? From what I read, it's the way of the future, but it's in permanent development hell. Ugh...)

>90 paradoxosalpha:

You see that sort of thing a lot in less-used corners of DDC; misclassified books, usually kids' books, end up dominating. There's no way to mark data as being suspect and thus not to be used for aggregations, so it makes the whole thing look bad.

A further note: It's wrong for books like the four I listed (in >86 paradoxosalpha:) to be classified under "Parapsychology and Occultism" (13X) since both parapsychology and occultism are informed by a dialogue with modern natural sciences that would be completely anachronistic to apply to renaissance philosophy, regardless of how that philosophy may later have contributed to occultist ideas and practices. On the other hand, this sloppiness may be related to >63 timspalding:; where DDC tacitly meant "Christianity" by "religion," "Parapsychology" may simply be code for "unacceptable pseudo-science" and "occultism" for "unacceptable pseudo-religion."

Edited to add: And the pejorative category gets the "unlucky" 13th decade of the system.

Perhaps a flip reference to existensialism, or in any case its caricature?

Exactly. But, look, there's no way NOT to be flip. These are emojis--they were designed for Japanese preteens to express various silly enthusiasms without talking. This is a language where, as every teen knows, a eggplant is NOT an eggplant!

To that end, I favor funny over serious.

I don't want to upset anyone, but I'm also not particularly apologetic if people get minor upsets. I didn't give German humor the 🚫 tag, but I thought it was funny. That the Germans aren't great humorists is standard American lore, along with English people being bad cooks and French people being good kissers; at this point it's a joke about a joke, not a joke. For the record, Phaedra thought it was funny too, who later didn't want hats for magic. I think it's great if people want to change things--go ahead, change both, as you desire. But let's try not to get too upset. Emojis are inherently flip, and the whole project is inherently funny, not serious.

>93 paradoxosalpha:

Go ahead and change the schedules. If you change the "modern" wording, it'll override the older ones. We can look at what the current DDC wording is, if you want inspiration, but we don't want people to copy it, as that presents legal dangers. Obviously any wording you choose is user-generated content, and not something we will check for copyright violations. For checking itself would make us liable.

This one needs a pentacle or an Enochian letter Un.

I'm okay with some of this. But I think we should try as much as possible to stick with emojis, not fish for other symbols in the vast unicode universe. So, let's keep the non-emoji percentage down, especially on the higher levels.

(Also, kudos to Tim for choosing a dark-skinned woman as the generic person for the "Biography" division (92X).)

I've tried to vary skin colors and genders a fair amount. You'll see it other places I went--black angels and a decidedly brown Jesus. When in doubt, we should probably do it more than "normal," simply because most people don't understand that people emojis often have variant forms, and that will push things toward white. (They're down the page on Emojipedia.)

>45 timspalding: Someone solved this one: For North America, a turkey.

Literature > Other Languages > North American
📚 > 🗨 > 🦃

Certainly worth changing from corn, at least once the encoding is supported. Might be better to hold of until then since it's a high-level category.

ETA: Likewise, 🦁 (lion face) for African is more specific than globe showing Europe/Africa or elephant of indeterminate variety. Should probably hold off a bit on that one, too, though.

>95 davidgn: For North America, a turkey.

But what about 894.3?
Literature > Other Languages > Altaic, Finno-Ugric, and Uralic literatures > Turkish literature

We need to decide on something for "more" or whatever else goes in the 9 position, like http://www.librarything.com/mds/29

Also "general" and etc. http://www.librarything.com/mds/000

Look, I suspect I have missed some of the Great Fun Tim is having... and not being a Librarian... BUT if TIM creates one of those émoji thingies (in the correct classification) which we ALL
know is CATS I will applaud him with one hand clapping :-)

Guido

🔬 > 🐼 > 🐰 > 🐴 > 😸
Mathematics And Science > Zoology > Mammals > Ungulata, Carnivora, Domestic mammals > Felines

The trouble is, we have have to use symbols from the same library for both the specific and the general, so it doesn't really convey the idea of the hierarchy of the scheme.

>99 timspalding: General can be 🌫 (Fog)

>98 timspalding: For "more", how about 👓 Eyeglasses ?

And in other news, I found this today...
https://twitter.com/hashtag/FakeUnicodeConsortium?src=hash

Is there a way to turn them off yet? Over half don't show up correctly on my computer. The ones that do show up are extremely distracting.

>105 casvelyn:
Yeah, same here too. Please let me turn them off.

*nods* I wouldn't mind so much except half of them being boxes is obnoxious.

Bumping for the ability to turn them off. They all show up now, in color, which makes it nearly impossible to focus on the text.

Bumping again.

I was starting up my own system for this very thing and someone pointed me here. I was considering using two or more emoji to represent a suibject. The current system I see here seems limited to one?

I started thus:
100 –👁️🧠 looking at brain
200 – 👁️🌟 looking at god

>110 hakanai: Yeah. I think it would be cool do to two, but one also has a certain virtue. Makes you try harder! :)