探花直播 of Cambridge - Alex Davies /taxonomy/people/alex-davies en 探花直播meaning of emoticons /research/news/the-meaning-of-emoticons <div class="field field-name-field-news-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img class="cam-scale-with-grid" src="/sites/default/files/styles/content-580x288/public/news/research/news/111012-smiley.jpg?itok=GvpBY5VD" alt="smiley" title="smiley, Credit: Candie_N from Flickr " /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Alex Davies, a Gates scholar at the 探花直播 of Cambridge, has created a visual map of the words associated with Twitter emoticons. It's not just the usual smiley and sad face emoticons whose meaning is fairly obvious and associated with words such as birthday, weekend and Friday and hospital, cold, stomach and pain respectively.</p>&#13; <p>Other emoticons include:</p>&#13; <p>^_^聽聽 This is associated with more immediate pleasures such as food and holidays. Words linked to it include shopping, lunch, dinner and chocolate. It is more associated with Asian Tweeters, but has begun to be used more in the West.</p>&#13; <p>&lt;3聽 This emoticon, which looks like a heart on its side, is associated with words such as love, music, amazing, proud, beautiful, thankful, Jesus and Justin.</p>&#13; <p>:/聽 This generally denotes a half-awake, slightly annoyed state, associated with words such as shift, sleeping, busy, class and Monday.</p>&#13; <p>-_-聽聽 This emoticon is indicative of frustration and is associated with words such as dumb, lame, dick and bitch.</p>&#13; <p>Davies says all the emoticons he has analysed have been around for at least as long as the Internet has been in existence, but some are less prevalent than others. Some were used exclusively in Asia, but have now spread to the West, and being adopted by particular groups.</p>&#13; <p>Davies, who is studying for a PhD in Engineering with a focus on statistical modelling, says: 鈥 探花直播creation of new emoticons has essentially stopped, but the context and usage of existing ones is constantly evolving. Take for example Asian style emoticons, such as ^_^ (happy) and -_- (sad).</p>&#13; <p>鈥淚nitially these were used almost exclusively by Asian online communities, but have slowly been adopted by different Western sub-cultures and have taken on subtly different meanings in these contexts. One way to visualise this usage is to visualise the words that are strongly associated with these emoticons. What is interesting is that two emoticons that essentially represent the same sentiment, such as :) and ^_^, actually differ substantially in how they are used, and we can see this in the images of the words.鈥</p>&#13; <p>Davies has also published a list of the happiness/sadness of 7,500 common words on Twitter after he was approached at an international conference about his previous work on creating a Twitter map of happiness. He was asked if he could release a list of words so people could easily create systems that use sentiment analysis of Twitter.</p>&#13; <p>Davies says: 鈥淭witter contains a wealth of sentiment information which researchers and businesses are very interested to explore so they can assess the changing global mood on different issues in real time and make predictions based on this.鈥</p>&#13; </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-content-summary field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><p> 探花直播emoticons used on Twitter are a language in themselves and are taking on new and often surprising meanings of their own, according to new research.</p>&#13; </p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-content-quote field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Initially these were used almost exclusively by Asian online communities, but have slowly been adopted by different Western sub-cultures and have taken on subtly different meanings in these contexts. </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-content-quote-name field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Alex Davies</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-image-credit field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/" target="_blank">Candie_N from Flickr </a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-image-desctiprion field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">smiley</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-cc-attribute-text field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"><img alt="" src="/sites/www.cam.ac.uk/files/80x15.png" style="width: 80px; height: 15px;" /></a></p>&#13; <p>This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.</p>&#13; </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-show-cc-text field-type-list-boolean field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Yes</div></div></div> Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:00:25 +0000 ns480 26422 at