November 12, 2016
Ashley Dainas, a Ph.D. student in Information Science, and Susan Herring, Professor of Information Science and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics, are researching graphical communication on the internet, or what they call “graphicons” (short for ‘graphical icons’) – a catch-all term for emoticons, emoji, stickers, GIFs, images and videos.
In a paper accepted for presentation at the upcoming Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Dainas and Herring investigate the use of graphicons in comment threads on posts to graphics-rich Facebook Groups. They used a grounded theory approach to classify the graphicons into eight functional categories: Mention (vs. Use), Reaction, Tone Modification, Riff, Action, Sequence, Ambiguous, and Other.
Emoji were used most often overall, and GIFs were least common in the comment threads, while images and videos tended to specialize as riffs. However, each graphicon type did not perform only one function, but rather each was used to express multiple overlapping functions, leading the researchers to conclude that graphicons are part of a larger functionally-related ecology of visual communication devices.
Dainas and Herring recently presented this research at the third annual Americal Pragmatics Association (AmPRA) conference held in Bloomington, IN November 4-6, and they will also be presenting it at the 50th annual HICSS conference on the Big Island in Hawai’i in January.
Their HICSS paper is available here:
Herring, S. C., & Dainas, A. R. (In press, 2017). "Nice picture comment!" Graphicons in Facebook comment threads. Proceedings of the Fiftieth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-50). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/hicss.graphicons.pdf
As a continuation of this research, Ashley Dainas is currently attempting to apply the graphicon classification scheme to the use of graphicons by trolls on Tumblr.