the meaning of ⚫

A black hole, a blackout, "be careful"? Even Emojipedia does not assign a specific meaning to the ⚫ emoji. I have encountered a frequent use during the burial of Gianluca Vialli, a very famous and beloved soccer champion who passed away at age 58. 

Among the hearts ❤️ 💙 and prayer 🙏🏻 and soccerballs ⚽ contained in the 307 (of 710, search n=1000) tweets, ⚫ appeared 33 times and kept the tenth position. 

Searching only tweets with ⚫, in 08/01/23 with n=100, the following 53 emojis are used:

🚨 7️⃣ 🤬 ✅ 🔝 🌸 💮 💛 🌷 ❤️ 📋 🐎 🖤 🧡 💻 📰 ⚪ 🎂 🎶 ♠️ 🎙️ 🇦🇷 ▪️ 💜 ⚫ 💙 🤝 🕷️ ◼️ 🔴 ♥️ ⏳ 📄 💚 🔲 🌹 😂 🏟️ ⭐ 🤎 🤮 🔳 🔥 🏴 ⛔ 📝 🔵 ♣️ 🥺 ✍️ 🚫 ◾ ☕

We can try to group these emojis
💛❤️🖤🧡💜🤎💙♥️💚 hearts
🌸💮🌷🌹         flowers
😂🎶🎂⭐☕🤝🔝✅     positive feelings
📄📋 📰 ✍️📝      writing/media
🤬⛔🤮🕷️🚫🚨      negative feelings
🥺🔥
♠️♣️
The others concern time (⏳), soccer (🏟️, 🇦🇷), a horse (🐎), or are probably color symbols for soccer teams, used in 
sentences like "#MonzaInter ⚫🔵\nForza ragazzi!". 
⚪⚫🔴🔵 🎙️▪️ ◼️  💻 🔲 🔳  🏴◾  7️⃣ .

The emoji contexts are
⚫ 🤬
⚫ 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮
🔴⚫
⚪⭐⭐⭐⚫
🗞📰 📎💻
⚪🔴⚪🔴⚫🔴
🔴⚫,
⚪⚫
🔵⚪🔴⚫⚪🔵
⚫⛔
💪🔴⚫
🤣🤣⚪⚫
💪⚫🔵
🖤💙🐍☕⚫🔵
⚫🔵🐍
🚨🤝🏻🔥⏳🔴⚫
What the black circle means? We can see it from the combination. Things like ⚫🔵 are color games. We  know, they 
are referred to soccer teams, but it could be anything else, like marmalade brands or political parties. And here? ⚫ 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮. Just what it says.


  

technically 

with R & emoji package, 

ntoken(kette)

 text1 

916269 

> emoji_count(kette)

[1] 8815

> textstat_frequency(alle_emojis, n=30)

   feature frequency rank docfreq group

1       ⚫      2379    1       1   all

2       ⚪       925    2       1   all

3       🔵       922    3       1   all

4       🔴       738    4       1   all

5       💪       316    5       1   all

6       ⚽       140    6       1   all

7       🖤       130    7       1   all

8       🔥       115    8       1   all

9        ❤️       106    9       1   all

10      🇮🇹        87   10       1   all

11      😂        80   11       1   all

12      💙        76   12       1   all

13      🏆        69   13       1   all

14      😍        69   13       1   all

15      👇        64   15       1   all

16    💪🏻        54   16       1   all

17       🎙️        53   17       1   all

18       1️⃣        49   18       1   all

19      🇾🇪        44   19       1   all

20      🤍        43   20       1   all

21      💦        38   21       1   all

22      👈        38   21       1   all

23       ⚠️        38   21       1   all

24      🟢        34   24       1   all

25      ⭐        34   24       1   all

26      ✅        33   26       1   all

27      ☕        32   27       1   all

28      😘        32   27       1   all

29      🐍        31   29       1   all

30       ♥️        30   30       1   all

  emoji_tweets total_tweets

         <int>        <int>

1         1000         1000

[1] "number of emojis"

 8815 

> print("unique emojis")

[1] "unique emojis"

> zeichenarten

text1 

  350 

[1] "emoji diversity"

0.03970505 

head(toptag)

[1] "#internapoli"      "#forzainter"      

[3] "#milan"            "#inter"           

[5] "#salernitanamilan" "#seriea"  

(soccer teams and First League)

Emoji Translation? 👀 🐻 😅 🌜 👑 🌈 ☕ ?

Whether you are a clueless boomer or a vibrant data scientist, the question: "How to know the meaning ....?" of 👀 🐻 😅 🌜 seemingly has an easy answer: Look it up!

Emojipedia, for example, explains a heart means "romance and love", while vomit stands for "disease or disgust". This could be the bridge even to convincing sentiment analyses. Instead of the heart, we will count the occurrences of the word "love".

Now, take emojis from tweets like "❤️🌼🍀", and write "love" "love, appreciation and happiness" and "good luck".

See "❤️✈️" and understand "love" "overseas vacation or airplane mode" or "love travel". Looking good?

What about "🤣✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️"? "Rolling ... laughing" "travel" "travel" "travel" "travel" "travel" "travel" "love" "love" "love" "love" "love"! OK, the repetition can be understood, and coded, as intensification. But how to get an intensification of "travel"? Maybe ✈️ is meaning something else, one time or the other.

If we have a look at the company ✈️ keeps, in Italian (100 tweets, 07/01/23) we get the following list of 41 emojis

🎶 📀 🇹🇭 🤩 💪 😂 ✈️ 🍾 🎥 📷 ☠️ 🌻 💙 🤣 👨 📽️ 🇳🇴 🇺🇸 ✨ 🥂 🐿️ 🌲 🔥 💀 🎵 ➡️ 🐮 ♥️ 🛬 😃 🇧🇾 ⏰ ❣️ 💛 🇦🇷 💜 🇰🇷 🇷🇺 🇺🇾 ⚰️ ❤️

In German, we find 39

⤵️ 🇹🇭 🤩 ✈️ 🎥 😉 💫 🆑 🧑 ♨️ 🚚 👨 🤣 🔊 ‼️ 😍 🌫️ 💢 🚽 😵 🖤 🇩🇪 😶 🐈 🚀 👀 🇦🇹 🚛 🙇 ♂️ 🚒 💵 📖 🐥 🐷 👩 😏 🛫 🇷🇺

In Italian, six different hearts and maybe the fire refer to love/positive emotion. In German, one loving face and a black heart give a different impression. Two red exclamation marks and a pig may indicate an aggressive tone. 

Doing the same tweet search with R, in 100 Italian tweets 
the program counts 683 emojis, with 61 unique ones. 21 red hearts and 17 coffins look rather emotional. Looking at the top hashtags, we 
understand why. 
head(toptag)
[1] "#donnalisi"      "#gfvip"         
[3] "#denzzzers"      "#incorvassi"    
[5] "#danieledalmoro" "#delizon"
All of them are related to a Reality Show, the Italian "Big BrotherVIP". 
The people tweeters are talking about are closed in an 
apartment in Rome. Nobody is going to fly. Indeed, the airplane here
is often used as "you make me fly" (mi fai volare) in the sense
of "with you I am living intense sensations". Which explains the 
✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️. 

In German, in 75 tweets collected we get 476 emojis, with 95 unique ones, which means the emoji diversity
is quite high (.2). 
Top hashtags are concerning the topic "flying": 
[1] "#boeing"    "#ryanair"   "#scotradar"
[4] "#lufthansa" "#3c4a04"    "#ireland" 
Main topics are linked to soccer (Bayern München ...). 
Studying single tweets, we also find "Wer randaliert fliegt" (whoever riots, gets kicked out)and 
"Randalierer abschieben" (deport rioters), which might account for aggressiveness
in some posts. 



technically

The emoji combinations have been fished with a Python request, n = 100, lang = it/de, on November, 22, 2022 and on January, 7, 2023. Use of emojis and emoji packages was essential.