How an Emoji Becomes an Emoji

A Zoom-based class about emojis for anyone online, with Jennifer 8. Lee and David J. Malan. How exactly does an emoji end up on your phone keyboard? It's actually a tightly regulated process overseen by the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organization based in Silicon Valley whose members are primarily multinational US tech companies. Jennifer 8. Lee '98-'99 is one of the founders of Emojination, a grassroots group whose motto is "Emoji for the people, by the people." This global network works to make the emoji approval process an inclusive and representative process. Among its accomplishments are HIJAB, DUMPLING, INTERRACIAL COUPLE, SARI, PINATA, as well as half of all emoji passed in the last years. Jenny is a vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. Jennifer 8. Lee '98-'99 is the co-founder of the literary studio Plympton, as well as a documentary film producer and a vice-chair of the Unicode emoji subcommittee. One of the youngest full reporters at The New York Times, where she worked for nearly a decade, Jenny is a producer of "The Search for General Tso" and "Picture Character," both which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. She's the author of the New York Times-bestselling book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008), where she showed that fortune cookies were actually Japanese. She does work around misinformation and is a co-founder of Misinfocon and the Credibility Coalition. She has served on the boards for the Nieman Foundation, the Center for Public Integrity, the Digital Public Library of America, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Hacks/Hackers, as well as committees for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, and SXSW programming. Jenny, who is a Fast Company Most Creative Person in 2018, graduated from Harvard College with a degree in applied math and economics. *** This is CS50, Harvard University's introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science a