American Scientist

Twitter hashtag games can be a great way for scientists to communicate their research in a fun—and often funny—way. The latest hashtag game, #EmojiYourPhD, challenges scientists to explain their research with the aid of emoji, the internet pictograms stereotypically associated with a teenager’s text messages. “One of the most effective communication strategies is to make creative use of familiar metaphors to explain scientific concepts to broad audiences,” says Anat Belasen, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan who popularized #EmojiYourPhD. (She notes that there were a few tweets using this hashtag from years ago.) “I think using emoji to describe what we do is a creative challenge and also forces us to condense our research into a digestible and recognizable form. Since emoji are simple pictures, they’re a common language that lots of people are able to understand.”

Here’s how #EmojiYourPhD works: Scientists compose a tweet that includes the hashtag #EmojiYourPhD to attempt to explain the subject of their research using emoji. Then, other Twitter users reply to those tweets and try to guess what the research is about. “I encourage anyone from any discipline—and not just PhD students—to try it out,” Belasen says.

It can be a real challenge to describe certain research topics using emoji because there are a limited number of them. (We didn’t get a shark emoji, which is the subject of my research, until last December.) This limitation has led to some creative ideas, such as using the emoji for jeans as genes, as well as this description of three-toed sloths. “A funny side-effect is that the biases of the emoji library are being brought to light. A few entomologists were upset that there is very low insect diversity in the animals section,” Belasen says. “How are you supposed to tweet about malaria with no mosquito emoji? Why are there three types of cattle and two different whales, yet no seal?”

Hashtag games such as #EmojiYourPhD aren’t just a useful communication exercise—they can also be a lot of fun! “Games like this demonstrate to general Twitter users that science is totally fun, and it also fits with the #actuallivingscientist idea that scientists are cool people too,” says Robyn Womack, a PhD student at the University of Glasgow who participated in #EmojiYourPhD. (In case you can’t figure it out from the emojis she used, Womack says that her primary research question is “What influences bird body clocks in the wild? Is it light pollution, disease, temperature, or weather patterns and seasonality?”)

Anat Belasen is pleased with the reception that #EmojiYourPhD has received so far. “I’ve seen people say, ‘Go check out #EmojiYourPhD ASAP,’ and, ‘I love all these hashtags that are helping me find new accounts to follow,’” she says. “We even had a high-school biology teacher tweet the hashtag to his students. We scientists are getting a kick out of it, and it’s nice to see people from lots of different disciplines join in. Hopefully nonscience ‘tweeps’ will enjoy it as well!”