If you find this topic interesting, David Imel put together a fantastic deep dive. He spent four months of research, went to Japan to interview the creator of emoji, and put together a very good video on the topic[0].[0] https://youtu.be/g-pG79LOtMw?si=htnop9jpjmE3kQ75
msephton|1 year ago
I applaud David for going to Japan, great to see such dedication. My issue with the video is that it simply retreads the accepted timeline rather than doing any critical research. He was in Japan and could have done some real digging, you know? What was he doing for four months? Just editing the video? I don't know. So, I think the content of the video is not a deep dive at all, as it doesn't uncover anything new. None of the stuff I uncovered for my blog post is covered. And we can now see more clearly than ever that Shigetaka Kurita is not the creator of emoji, but rather the creator of the most well-know set of emoji that was perhaps the first use of the sparkle emoji. That's a pretty big difference.
BTW my research was conducted in my free time over less than two weeks. It consisted of some googling, talking with Japanese friends, reading Japanese wikipedia (with browser translation, as can't read it natively) and that is all from the comfort of my own desk. So I would say anybody is capable of having done this.
Of course, I had the bonus of being clued in that earlier history existed thanks to the device I had in my hands. But my point is that we should always question sources and accepted history, because more often than not there's additional story to be told.
mobiledev2014|1 year ago