Happy 25th Birthday to :-)

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman made a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. He was the first to use three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message. Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)” wrote Fahlman. “Read it sideways.”

The prehistory of emoticons goes back to 1857 when the National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide documented the use of the number 73 in Morse code to express "love and kisses." In 1887 Ambrose Bierce proposed adding a punctuation mark that he called a “snigger point” to “every jocular or ironical clause of a sentence otherwise serious.” Bierce's call for sarcastic punctuation was itself couched in sarcasm, as evidenced in this passage from The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. XI: Antepenultimata (1912), courtesy of Google Books:


Emoticons, text-speak, and general “net lingo” have been the subject of much research, generally falling under the umbrella of computer-mediated communication (CMC) or computer-mediated discourse (CMD). Language is of such great interest perhaps because most Internet interaction is achieved through text. The Internet has often been hailed as a new and different space for language use: written, yet free from the formality of much conventional written media, and divorced from many of the social constraints of face-to-face conversation.

Co-Branded Distance Learning

The New York Times announced a major push into higher education with distance learning courses provided by six initial partner universities. The new venture, the New York Times Knowledge Network, will provide technology and marketing for courses taught by college and university professors. Funds from the tuition revenue will be split, with the price formula varying, between the college and the Times. Course topics and approaches vary from a seminar on the art and craft of film offered by Mount Holyoke College to a self-paced project management course by Towson University. Professors can make customized web pages with their own content alongside content from the Times, such as interactive maps, video, audio, and graphs. For example, Mount Holyoke's film course will feature an interview between the instructor and New York Times film critic A.O. Scott. In addition, courses will have full access to the services of Epsilen, a company that offers blogs, electronic portfolios, and interactive teaching tools. When I think about the Times archives, I realize this could be an incredible resource for teaching. More interestingly, though, is how the archives could be cross-referenced to enrich learning and research.