Emoji Dick is an emoji translation of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick compiled by data scientist Fred Benenson, currently an employee at Y Combinator and previously the second employee ever at Kickstarter.

To compile his translation, Benenson raised money from 83 backers on Kickstarter and then crowdsourced the translation to more than 800 anonymous internet users on Amazon Mechanical Turk. In an automated process, each line of the novel was translated 3 times into emoji by Turks (paid 5 cents each per line), and then the best of three versions was chosen by another group of Turks who acted as voters (paid 2 cents each per vote).

The process of translating the book in an automated fashion was what interested Benenson the most - he thinks the translation succeeded "as a conceptual piece," but estimates that less than 10% of the translated lines showed any true flash of brilliance.

You can judge for yourself; the full translation is available here.

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