Fred Benenson, Emoji Dick

[website]

"In Emoji Dick, each and every sentence of Melville’s classic is paired with its pictogram equivalent. The book is the creation of Fred Benenson, a data engineer at the fund-raising site Kickstarter, who has been passionate about emoji since 2009, when he first activated the icons on his iPhone using a third-party app. (Apple at first intended emoji only for the Japanese market, and didn’t open them to U.S. consumers until 2011.) Benenson sent message after message to his brother, getting excited about this “new mode of expression,” he says. Eventually, he wondered, “What’s the furthest I could push this?” Benenson didn’t emojify Moby-Dick by himself. Using more than $3,500 raised from Kickstarter, he had the worker bees of Amazon’s online Mechanical Turk—a service that pays people small sums to do small online tasks—go through the text line by line. Three people translated each sentence; a second set voted on which translation was best." [Smithsonian Magazine]