Alice Fleerackers

Our lab is growing! In our *Three Questions* series, we're profiling
each of our members and the amazing work they're doing.

Today's post features ScholCommLab member [Rémi
T](https://www.scholcommlab.ca/remi-toupin/)[o](https://www.scholcommlab.ca/remi-toupin/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}[upin](https://www.scholcommlab.ca/remi-toupin/), a PhD
candidate studying the contexts of climate change research communication
[on
Twitter](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0268999){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"} at the Université du Québec à Montréal
(UQAM). In this interview, he tells us about his doctoral work, his
recent foray into science communication, and the surprising joys of
winter cycling. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large">
<img
src="https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_2093-1024x683.jpg"
class="wp-image-3580" loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_2093-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_2093-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_2093-768x512.jpg 768w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_2093-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_2093-2048x1365.jpg 2048w"
sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" width="1024" height="683"
alt="ScholCommLab member Rémi Toupin poses in front of a vibrant evergreen tree" />
<figcaption>ScholCommLab member and PhD candidate Rémi Toupin | Photo by
Mirjam Fines-Neuschild</figcaption>
</figure>

## Q#1 What are you working on at the lab? {#q1-what-are-you-working-on-at-the-lab .wp-block-heading}

I got involved in the [*Altmetrics and Societal
Impact*](http://scholcommlab.ca/research/altmetrics-and-societal-impact/){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"} project through my doctoral research, which
uses a mixed method approach to understand the contexts of climate
change research communication on Twitter. I hope that getting to know
who tweets climate change research as well as the relationships between
them will shed light about some of the specific ways scholarly documents
permeate outside of academia. It could also help us build comprehensive
tools to assess the societal resonance of research.

## Q#2 Tell us about a recent paper, presentation, or project you're proud of. {#q2-tell-us-about-a-recent-paper-presentation-or-project-youre-proud-of. .wp-block-heading}

It just launched! Starting last summer, I got involved in [Le numérique
en questions](https://numeriqueenquestions.ca/){.broken_link
rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"}, a science communication
project started by the *[UQAM Research Chair on the Uses of Digital
Technologies and Communication
Changes](https://florencemillerand.uqam.ca/florence-millerand/distinctions/chaire-de-recherche-uqam-sur-les-usages-des-technologies-numeriques-et-les-mutations-de-la-communication/){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}* to share knowledge about digital practices.
Although the project is exclusively in French for now, further
developments will focus on adapting our content to other communities as
well as engaging with new formats. As for me, I'll produce new
content---blog posts and infographics---about exciting topics such as
digital security and the ecological footprint of the internet!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large">
<img
src="https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/le-numerique-home-page-1024x612.png"
class="wp-image-3370" loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/le-numerique-home-page-1024x612.png 1024w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/le-numerique-home-page-300x179.png 300w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/le-numerique-home-page-768x459.png 768w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/le-numerique-home-page.png 1110w"
sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" width="1024" height="612"
alt="Home page of le numerique en questions, displaying various blog posts about digital information " />
<figcaption><a href="https://numeriqueenquestions.ca/"
class="broken_link" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Le
numérique en questions</a> is a new go-to resource for questions about
the internet, the Web, and social media. </figcaption>
</figure>

## Q#3 What's the best (or worst) piece of advice you've ever received?  {#q3-whats-the-best-or-worst-piece-of-advice-youve-ever-received .wp-block-heading}

I have received a lot of really good advice over the years, but one that
stands out was a friend motivating me to use my bike for everything from
commuting to long distance travel. Since then, I hop on my bike whenever
I get the chance---even in the snow---and cycling and enjoying the
outdoors really boosts my energy levels! 

On the other hand, a frustrating piece of advice I received was from a
professor who told us to never drink red wine during academic happy
hours, the reason being that if you spill it on someone else's expensive
shirt they will have a bad lasting impression of you. So much for
helping students feel empowered!

**Find Rémi on Twitter at**
[**@RemiToup**](https://twitter.com/@RemiToup){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}**.**


Our lab is growing! In our
<em>
 Three Questions
</em>
series, we’re profiling each of our members and the amazing work they’re doing.

Three questions with… Rémi!

Do academics use emojis on Twitter? Stefanie Haustein analyzed more than 40 million tweets mentioning scientific journal articles, preprints, conference proceedings, and other documents to find out.

"Should there be an emoji for everything?" asked journalist Sophie
Haigney in a recent [*New Yorker*
article](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/should-there-be-an-emoji-for-everything){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}. "What, exactly, do we want from our emojis?"

The future of the emoji may be uncertain, but one thing is abundantly
clear. Emojis are booming. From classic smiley faces to dancing "party
parrots," there are now almost 3,000 options to choose from. They fill
our text messages, our Slack chats, our emails---even [some of our
books](https://medium.com/@Jefnwk/3-books-written-entirely-in-emojis-can-you-read-them-fffe71119530){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}. In 2015 the "tears of joy" emoji was
declared [Word of the
Year](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/emoji-named-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries-a6737146.html){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"} by Oxford Dictionaries.

But despite the digital dominance of emojis, they haven't infiltrated
every aspect of daily life. Recent research by ScholCommLab co-director
Stefanie Haustein reveals that, when it comes to scholarly
communication, emojis mostly get a 👎.

<figure id="attachment_2218" class="wp-caption alignnone"
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2218" style="width: 1024px">
<img
src="https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/emojis.jpg"
class="wp-image-2218 size-full" loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/emojis.jpg 1024w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/emojis-300x225.jpg 300w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/emojis-768x576.jpg 768w"
sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" width="1024" height="768"
alt="Image of emoji plushies" />
<figcaption><a
href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/38417869@N00/23979953332"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“Emojis”</a>by <a
href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/38417869@N00" target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer">xelipe</a> is licensed under <a
href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=ccsearch&amp;atype=html"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY-NC-SA
2.0</a></figcaption>
</figure>

## **Why study emojis?**

Stefanie first decided to investigate emojis as part of a [larger
research project exploring how academic work is shared on
Twitter](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1806/1806.02201.pdf){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}. The goal was to understand what kinds of
scientific documents are tweeted most, as well as when, how, and by
whom. She hoped the emoji data would offer a more nuanced view of the
academic Twittersphere.

"The idea was to capture another level of meaning and emotion in the
tweets," she explains. "Emojis are a unique form of visual
communication---they have the potential to add to what's shared through
standard means, like words and hashtags, especially in short messages
like tweets."

Using data from Altmetric, she analyzed more than 40 million tweets
mentioning scientific journal articles, preprints, conference
proceedings, and other documents. Then, she analyzed each tweet for
emojis, noting both the type and number used. Here's what she found:

## **Less than 1% of scholarly tweets use emojis**

Although [10-15% of academics use
Twitter](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/asi.23833){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}, only a small proportion rely on emojis. Of
the 42.5 million tweets Stefanie analyzed, only
286,087---0.7%---contained at least one emoji.

|           |                            |            |                 |                       |
|-----------|----------------------------|------------|-----------------|-----------------------|
| **Emoji** | **Category**               | **Tweets** | **Occurrences** | **Tweeted documents** |
| **👍**    | **Liking**                 | **15,688** | **19,018**      | **5,911**             |
| **👇**    | **Pointing**               | **13,432** | **20,308**      | **2,426**             |
| **➡️**    | **Pointing**               | **11,403** | **13,896**      | **2,415**             |
| **♀️**    | **Gender**                 | **10,983** | **13,071**      | **2,590**             |
| **👉**    | **Pointing**               | **8,523**  | **9,805**       | **2,056**             |
| **👏**    | **Liking**                 | **8,459**  | **16,436**      | **3,265**             |
| **💪**    | **Sports**                 | **6,899**  | **8,528**       | **1,746**             |
| **🔒**    | **Reading**                | **6,326**  | **7,063**       | **234**               |
| **❤️**    | **Liking**                 | **6,178**  | **7,597**       | **2,611**             |
| **😂**    | **Faces**                  | **5,505**  | **10,053**      | **3,006**             |
| **😉**    | **Faces**                  | **5,438**  | **5,923**       | **3,094**             |
| **😀**    | **Faces**                  | **5,312**  | **6,222**       | **2,728**             |
| **😊**    | **Faces**                  | **5,251**  | **5,996**       | **2,771**             |
| **✅**    | **Check**                  | **5,151**  | **7,860**       | **642**               |
| **🔬**    | **Science and technology** | **5,142**  | **5,782**       | **1,595**             |
| **👌**    | **Liking**                 | **4,665**  | **5,511**       | **1,958**             |
| **☺️**    | **Faces**                  | **4,628**  | **4,804**       | **1,277**             |
| **🚀**    | **Science and technology** | **4,285**  | **4,412**       | **3,470**             |
| **🏋️**    | **Sports**                 | **3,675**  | **4,443**       | **533**               |
| **😳**    | **Faces**                  | **3,613**  | **4,953**       | **1,396**             |

These results are surprising, given how popular emojis are beyond the
academic sphere. Researchers estimate that more than [90% of people have
used emojis in some form of digital
communication](https://www.adweek.com/digital/report-92-of-online-consumers-use-emoji-infographic/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}. On Twitter, almost [1 in 5
tweets](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W16-2610){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"} contain at least one.

Emojis aren't just popular; they're also powerful. Digital marketing
research has found that tweets with [emojis are more than 25% more
engaging](https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/11/19/twitter-emoji){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"} than those without. Using emojis in social
media can boost [click-through-rates, likes,
shares](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-emojis){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}, and more.

"I was really taken aback by how few tweets linking to academic papers
contained emojis," Stefanie says, "It made me wonder whether academics
are missing out."

However, academics may just be late to the game: the uptake of emojis
increased over the years from 0.02% in 2013 up to 1.57% in 2017 📈.

## **Academic emojis fall into 6 categories**

The tweets that *did* contain emojis followed very distinct patterns.
Among the 50 most tweeted emojis, most fell into one of the following
six categories:

### 1. Faces    (🤔😱😉😁) {#faces}

26 of the 100 most used emojis were face-based emojis. These tweets
expressed a range of emotions, likely to show the users' personal
opinion about the document they were sharing.

### 2. Liking (👍❤️👏) {#liking}

17% of the 100 most used emojis suggested a positive judgment of some
sort, usually of the scientific document being discussed.

### 3. Science and technology (🔬 🚀 🌏) {#science-and-technology}

13 out of 100 most tweeted emojis included scientific imagery, like
satellites or microscopes. These emojis were often content-specific---as
when rockets appeared in tweets about astrophysics research. Other
times, they played a more general role, simply highlighting the
scientific nature of the tweet.

### 4. Signs (🔴⚠️❗) {#signs}

8 out of 100 emojis were signs, which seemed intended to grab attention.

### 5. Pointing (👇➡️👉) {#pointing}

Gestures, like pointing fingers or arrows, featured in 6% of the 100
most-tweeted emojis. Many of these pointed to a link for the scientific
document being mentioned.

### 6. Reading (👀 📚 📄) {#reading}

Reading emojis, like books and documents, seemed to play a similar role
as the pointing emojis. They appeared 6 out of 100 times.

Many of the top scholarly emojis overlap with [those that are popular in
general](http://www.emojitracker.com/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}. But some, like the emojis in the reading and
technology categories, seem to be particular to academia.

## **Different countries use emojis differently**

In addition to these general trends, Stefanie also identified distinct
patterns of emoji use between countries. That is, when sharing research
findings on Twitter, users from Brazil or Germany favoured different
emojis than those from Japan or Canada, for example.

Here are the top 10 emojis used by Brazil, Canada, Germany, the UK,
Japan, and the US:

![A chart of the top 10 emojis in Canada, Germany, the US, UK, Japan,
and
Brazil](https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Top-10-Emojis-by-Country.png){.size-full
.wp-image-2217 .alignnone loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="867"
height="623"
srcset="https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Top-10-Emojis-by-Country.png 867w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Top-10-Emojis-by-Country-300x216.png 300w, https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Top-10-Emojis-by-Country-768x552.png 768w"
sizes="(max-width: 867px) 100vw, 867px"}

Although it's not possible to draw firm conclusions about these
differences, these results do raise interesting questions. For example,
does the popularity of the lock emoji (🔒) in Brazil, Canada, and the US
suggest that conversations about paywalls and Open Access are
front-of-mind for these countries? Are questions about gender issues (♀️
and ♂️) more common in nations like Japan, Canada, and the US than in
others?

Exploring these questions is a task for future research. But, for now,
these findings offer a more nuanced understanding of emoji-based
communication in the scholarly sphere.

"It was fascinating to see how each country used emojis differently,"
Stefanie says. "No two were the same."

[Emojis may be a 'universal
language'](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151012-will-emoji-become-a-new-language){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}, but it seems to be spoken with a wide range
of accents, dialects, and expressions.

***To find out more about the project, check out Stefanie Haustein's
book chapter on [Scholarly Twitter Metrics, available as a preprint at
arXiv.org.](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1806/1806.02201.pdf){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}  ***


“Should there be an emoji for everything?” asked journalist Sophie Haigney in a recent
<em>
 New Yorker
</em>
article. “What, exactly, do we want from our emojis?”  The future of the emoji may be uncertain, but one thing is abundantly clear. Emojis are booming. From classic smiley faces to dancing “party parrots,” there are now almost 3,000 options to choose from. They fill our text messages, our Slack chats, our emails—even some of our books.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Three questions with… Rémi!

Emojis in Scholarly Communication: 🔥 or 💩?