Fred Benenson launches Emoji Dick, a project that aims to translate 10 000 sentences from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into emojis. Benenson enlists over 800 people through Mechanical Turk, where you pay anywhere from a couple of cents to a couple of dollars for humans to complete defined tasks, that in the end spends over 3,795,980 seconds to write the book. Benenson raises the money to pay his army of translators via the crowdsourcing platform Kickstarter.

“I’m interested in the phenomenon of how our language, communications, and culture are influenced by digital technology. Emoji are either a low point or a high point in that story, so I felt I could confront a lot of our shared anxieties about the future of human expression (see: Twitter or text messages) by forcing a great work of literature through such a strange new filter”, explains Fred Benenson on the Kickstarter.