2014-04-01 18:43 GMT+02:00 Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse_at_ilyaz.org>:
> However, this MAY be a beginning of revolution in scientific
> communication. Science-and-about publications contains very long
> words in abundance, and it is HERE where impact of emojification
> should be felt the most! So I think the task of emojification of
> scientific terms — be it “secularization”, “gamma-globulin”, or
> “derived ∞-category” — should be at elevated priority in the Unicode
> commitees.
The general public often considers scientific publications are too
> dense, and does not bother to read many scienific journals.
Density of scientific publication is not much about word lengths (actually
they are not really longer than in general text) but in terms of precision
added by each word and associated informations that require frequent use of
qualifiers and subqualifiers.
Frequently it is difficult to give names to the concepts so scientists will
start using notations, and many abbreviations defined specifically for a
document or topic which can only be understood in their specific context
(outside this context, or without prior knowledge of commonly used
conventions the text will look extremely confuse).
Note also that the common use of synonyms in generic speach does not apply
here because scientists tend to create stronger distinctions between terms
that most public would not really discriminate. This is all about
terminology and even this list frequently has problems discussing concepts
due to terms that are now carrying more precise meaning (an example on this
list is all the discussions related to "character", "codes", "code points",
"collation element" vs. "collating element" : the general public cannot see
the differences and the specifications then look very confusive or obscure
to them).
Reading a scientific paper requires then much more attention and prior
knowledge of specific conventions.
> What
>
Google did is a beginning of a major step forward in making
> contemporary science (finally!) accessible to general public.
>
Not at all. Emojis are certainly not what scientists are using for their
needed conventions, simply because their representation is too much
permissive (they carry similar "emotions", their glyphs are frequently
modified with lots of variants, different colors, styles.)
In fact scientists do not use emojis. When thye need to summaize concepts,
they create conventional abreviations/acronyms, or symbols with precise
glyphs (and the glyph appearence is semantically important, e.g. in maths,
chemical formulas, electronic, physics, building engineering...), or
specific terminologies (legal texts...). These conventions are not freely
translatable with emojis.
Even a cookbook for meals cannot use easily emojis. If words are not enough
qualifying, they'll use photos. But cuisine or gardening also has its own
terminology.
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Received on Tue Apr 01 2014 - 20:33:25 CDT
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