This is my emoji-cloud representing the emojis sent in the selected period of time. The application is interactive, so I can select the year from the ‘Years’ axis and the season I want from the ‘Seasons’ axis.

The ‘Total’ option corresponds the sum of every other option in that bar.

I have used the 😍 emoji 20588 times (yep, I really like it, ahah).

How do I know this?

My mouse over the 😂 emoji

When the cursor is over an emoji, the program displays a label where the frequency of use of that emoji (in the selected period of time) is shown.

My interactive application in Processing

As you can see from the gif above, the dimension of the emojis could not have been proportional to each other, otherwise the emojis used only once could not have been visible. Since I wanted to show all the emojis, the dimension of the images is indicative.

But even if using this strategy, you are able to see that I do a massive use of certain emojis, while I occasionally use the rest of them.

These are the emojis sent in June, July and August 2017

I also wanted the different temporal views to be coherent between themselves. You can notice the drastic change of dimension of the images when I consider a shorter period of time.

What kind of emotions my emojis express? Is the sentiment of my emojis positive, neutral or negative?

In order to answer this question, I needed an emoji ranking kind of data. I was querying Google for ‘emoji psychology’, ‘emoji sentiment’ and so on, then I found a paper in which an emoji ranking is calculated. Here you can find the paper I’m talking about; here you can find the resulting ranking file.

The authors found a way to assign a positive, neutral and negative value to a limited set of emojis (751).

I decided to apply these results to mine, to discover how many emojis I used during 2015, 2016 and 2017 (the only years of which I had all the messages) and how many times I expressed positive, neutral and negative sentiments through those emojis.

If you look at the table you can see that every emoji has three values, so even if I use a happy emoji a little percentage of negative and neutral sentiment is still being counted. Looking at the values in the table I saw that there are certain emojis that have a predominant sentiment (or rather when max (positive, neutral, negative) > sum (positive, neutral, negative) — max (positive, neutral, negative) ) so I decide to also show (through the opacity channel) in my visualisation the number of times I was predominantly positive, neutral and negative.

I decided to represent the sentiments using this palette from Color Hunt, and in particular:

positivity with the color #4E3188

neutrality with #24BABC

negativity with #EAEF9B

This is what the results look like:

Here you can see that in 2015 I sent the maximum number of emojis, followed by 2017 and 2016. In 2015 I was pretty positive, in 2016 I was more neutral than in the other two years, while 2017 was the most negative one, based on the emoji ranking paper results.

This represents the sum of all the values of positivity, neutrality and negativity.

What if I want to have a more detailed view of the single years?

If my cursor is over a year, I can see this:

focus on 2015

focus on 2016

focus on 2017

The opacity of the bar states for how many times I was predominantly positive (neutral or negative) comparing to all the times I was positive (neutral or negative).

I don’t use emojis to express my neutrality: if I want to be neutral, I don’t use any emoji. And this is reflected on the opacity of the neutral sentiment in the three views above. I always use more positive emojis than negative ones, and in 2015 I used positive predominantly emojis (you can notice this by watching the opacity of the purple bar).

Which emojis do I send in which chat?

I wanted to explore the use of my 25 most used emojis of all time in the single chats, so I thought a correlation map could be useful for the sake of this.

I sorted my chats based on the amount of emojis I sent in them, and only took the ones in which I sent at least one emoji.