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Temporal Drift of Emoji Meanings in GitHub Commit Messages
This page measures the monthly frequency of individual emoji that appear in public GitHub commit messages. It also calculates the Shannon entropy of emoji usage each month to gauge the diversity and unpredictability of emoji choice. The data are gathered by scraping commit messages from openly available repositories, filtering for Unicode emoji characters, and aggregating counts per calendar month. Tracking these metrics shows how developers’ expressive habits evolve, revealing shifts in sentiment or status that standard sentiment‑analysis tools miss. Because emoji meanings can drift over time, the dataset offers a unique view of informal communication in software development.