Hamdan Azhar - An Introduction to Emoji Data Science in R

An Introduction to Emoji Data Science in R by Hamdan Azhar

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Abstract: Emojis have been called a “new type of language.” According to statistics cited by Ad Week, as much as 92% of the online population uses emojis. Twitter reports that since 2014 alone, over 110 billion emojis have been tweeted.

Yet, despite the profusion of emojis in digital life, little research has been done that leverages emojis to understand popular sentiment. We believe that emoji data science, a largely unexplored field, might be a powerful new methodology for both the computational social sciences as well as fast data journalism.

We’ll share preliminary research based on an analysis of millions of tweets that explores the relevance of emoji analytics to fields ranging from pop culture (i.e. the Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift dispute), to politics (the US presidential elections as well as Brexit), to gender norms, to the Olympics, and more.

We’ll also introduce concepts including emoji valence, hashtag-emoji co-occurrence, and sentiment analysis that combine the fields of computational linguistics and natural language processing to provide building blocks for understanding what emojis mean and what they reveal about our culture.

Bio: Hamdan Azhar is a data science, analytics, and research leader with over 12 years of experience discovering meaningful insights in complex datasets and using storytelling to drive business, product, and social impact. The founder of PRISMOJI, he was formerly a director at Blockchain Technologies Corporation, and prior to that, was a data scientist at Facebook, at GraphScience, and on Ron Paul's 2012 presidential campaign.

A prolific writer and public speaker, his writings on technology and culture have been published in WIRED, VICE, Forbes, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has taught data science courses at Boston University and at the City University of New York and has delivered invited lectures in 14 countries. He is a co-inventor on Facebook's granted patent on emoji machine learning.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Hamdan holds a master’s degree in biostatistics from the University of Michigan, a bachelor’s degree in economics from Penn State, and completed one year of the Ph.D. program in neuroscience at the University of Chicago.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HamdanAzhar

Presented at the 2022 New York R Conference (June 10, 2022)