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No text message is complete without emojis: They are practical, funny, and sometimes quirky, and they have become an integral part of everyday communication. Emojis are so-called ideograms, a pictographic script the characters of which are stylized images. They bring symbols into written language. Emojis make it possible to compose messages using a combination of letters and images, and they enable a form of metalinguistic communication that did not previously exist in modern Western languages.
After spending quite some time developing web apps such as swisspeaX, Altiswiss, and Mont, and thanks to the OpenMoji project at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch-Gmünd, Germany, which provides hundreds of high-quality open-source emojis, the idea of following the example of ancient maps with their simple topographical symbols and creating an emoji map of the world seemed obvious.
Prof. em. Thomas Weibel
Realpstrasse 55
4054 Basel
Switzerland
(ȼ) twb, OpenMoji, CC BY-SA