This chapter focuses on the technical aspects of emoji, including how emoji are encoded and rendered for use in digital communication. The chapter explains how emoji are developed by the Unicode Consortium as well as considering the social implications of this process. Unicode characters, and emoji codepoints, modifiers, and sequences are explained. The chapter also deals with emoji design and aesthetics, and explains how emoji are visually rendered as glyphs by different ‘vendors’ such as social media platforms. The chapter then examines the role of semiotic technologies in both enabling and constraining the ways they are used. It concludes by discussing the implications of emoji encoding and rendering on corpus construction, annotation, and concordancing.

This chapter reflects on the changes in written communication associated with digital technology using some of the perspectives developed in earlier chapters. In particular, it focuses on differences in materiality and changes in display and design. When considering digital communication, there is plenty of evidence that writing is in ascendency, and that there is increased diversification in what we write and how we write it. New questions about who finds a voice and how we evaluate what is written have arisen. In times of post-truth, populism, political and religious extremism, writing can still be dangerous but it can also work to unite and consolidate, as it has done in the recent pandemic. If writing plays such a significant role in our social and cultural life, using it wisely is crucially important.

This chapter covers how to get and use data from the internet. It covers methods for parsing webpages and for how to treat different character encodings. It also treats parallel processing to a certain extent as it has real consequences when dealing with remote data.