© 2018 Sujay Khandekar OPICO: A PLATFORM FOR COLLECTING AND ANALYZING EMOJI USAGE BY SUJAY KHANDEKAR THESIS

Emojis have emerged as a popular form of digital communication that can quickly convey big ideas or expressions with a single character. Since their creation in 1999, emojis have become a mainstay in the digital lexicography of instant messaging and social media. However, emojis are traditionally used in conjunction with text, as supplemental metadata. This paper explores the feasibility of emoji-only communication and emoji grammars. To gather emoji-only data, we built Opico, an emoji-first, social media mobile app that allows users to share emoji reactions about the places they visit with their friends. Each post in the app is a one-to-five emoji sentence to express an emotion, sentiment, or description about a location. After collecting over 3500 emoji reactions and having over 900 users on the app, the results demonstrate emoji-only communication provided concise forms of expression about various locations across the world. Data analysis has uncovered the various patterns and linguistics of how users construct emoji-only sentences, building the foundation for an emoji grammar.