March 2016: SXSW talk about emoji and many emoji interviews

March was a month of emoji!

I gave a talk at SXSW about the linguistics of emoji in collaboration with SwiftKey. You can see our slides with notes, listen to our full talk, see pictures, and view the livetweets on #EmojiLang. The talk was a lot of fun and we had a full audience of 275 people.

There was a lot of media from my SXSW talk from around the world:

• In the Austin Chronicle, the Daily Dot, and the Four Kitchens podcast (US)
• In the Guardian and Marketing Magazine (UK)
• In the Irish Times (Ireland)
• In Le Monde (France)
• In Jetzt.de and Meedia.de (Germany)
• In News.Sina.com, ET Today, and China Times (China)

I also had two print interviews go out, both about emoji: in WIRED with Clive Thompson and in the Austin Chronicle’s SXSW Interactive special edition. I also met a lot of great people and went to some fantastic talks at SXSW – you can see a list of other interesting things to check out at the bottom of this post.

Other media included:

• How LOL became a punctuation mark (The Atlantic)
• Associated Press wire interview on emoji with Leanne Italie, published in several news outlets including the Salt Lake Tribune and Global News (although note that I am based in Montreal, not Toronto)
• Canadian Press wire interview on emoji with David Friend, published in several news outlets including 680 News and the Vancouver Sun
• CBC radio interview with Dan Misener (not online, aired March 1 on 21 Drive shows across Canada)
• Are emoji sexist? (Toronto Star)
• The linguistic appeal of “garbage person” (Atlas Obscura)

I also participated in the Art+Feminism Wikipedia editathon for the 3rd year.

Selected blog posts:

• Marvel, Wakanda and the problem with “an African dialect”
• xkcd: podium vs lectern and sneaky elicitation techniques and xkcd discovers biscuit conditionals
• Another addition to the novel sentence archives
• Bad linguistics journalism bingo
• A 3-minute grammar of knitting
• John McWhorter on what it means for him to “sound black”
• Words that sound like their meanings are easier to learn
• Old-school telegraph speak looks a lot like text speak
• There’s no such thing as apostrophe logic
• Bernie Sanders’s accent, explained

Here are photos the two print interviews plus a bonus picture of the linguistics section at The Last Bookstore in Austin, Texas (shelved, interestingly, next to public speaking).