Taking Playfulness Seriously - When character sets are used in unexpected ways

Gretchen McCulloch, author of bestselling "Because Internet", will join us to give a live presentation & Q&A of the keynote that she is delivering at the Unicode conference the week before.

Update: the meetup will be online. Unfortunately there is rain forecast so an outdoor venue wouldn't work and an outdoor "covered" venue wouldn't be safe with this many people.

Summary:
When encoding characters, it's easy to look at formal reference documents: dictionaries, descriptive grammars, and other published materials. But most of the writing on the internet doesn't go through editorial standardization, which means that users can pick up characters originally encoded for one purpose and repurpose them for something else. By their very nature, there isn't a finite list of Unicode subversions, but some examples include: ASCII art, zalgo, glitch text, kaomoji, math mode alphabets used as ad-hoc fonts, and emoji sequences used as graphic elements.

Problems then arise when creative sequences are parsed by tools which have only been designed for conventional sequences, for example when ASCII art is read by screenreaders, kaomoji get broken across linebreaks, or emoji need to be rendered in LaTeX. Current workarounds are chiefly to screencap creative sequences and replace them as images with alt text, which defeats the many benefits of using Unicode characters in the first place (interoperability, searchability, editability, copy-paste-ability, etc). These workarounds are a reasonable stopgap when a creative sequence is new and it is unclear whether it will persist; however, given that several are now up to decades old, I explore what a more systematic approach to the category of playful sequences could look like.

Bio:
Gretchen McCulloch (https://gretchenmcculloch.com/) is an internet linguist: she explores the language of the internet for the people of the internet. She’s the co-creator & co-host of Lingthusiasm; the author of the New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and the Washington Post); and co-founder of LingComm, the International Conference on Linguistics Communication.

We will add information about how to join the event online shortly before it starts!