Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2017 15:32:20 +0200
Perhaps not the first, but that I know of at least.
I don't know since when, but *Writing Systems Research*, published by
Taylor & Francis, is using cute emojis as markers for
references/hyperlinks, in the web edition only (not in the PDF release):
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17586801.2017.1335634
Presumably they might do this for all their online journals; I can't find
out because this publisher's a paywalling capitalist pig. To my boundless,
heartbreaking disappointment, these emojis are not U+1F4D8 BLUE BOOKs 📘
from a custom @css font, but rather private-use U+F02Ds, which index a book
glyph in some icon pack called Font Awesome
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_Awesome>. At least they're inserted
via CSS :before-selectors, which means they'll be automatically treated as
decorations and seamlessly excluded from copy-paste operations.
I rate this a typographic blunder, as they inelegantly crowd the page
overwhelming the text, and are neither pretty nor functional (the somber
blue is a good highlight for the hyperlinks; the big dark blobs highlight
them too much—I'm not *that *interested in the reference links that I'd
want them metaphorically blown all over my face; I'd rather have them
unobtrusively in margin notes, along with their metadata and asides).
Still, I like the sheer iconoclastic bravado of using emoji in such a
context. I kind of hope that someone comes up with *good *uses of emoji in
otherwise serious media.
