“
Two friends, Matt Gray and Tom Scott, set up a website in 2014 where people could communicate only via emojis—even usernames were strings of emojis. It was a joke, but nonetheless, sixty thousand people signed up; Gray and Scott began taking confused calls from investors who thought their site was an ambitious new tech startup. Meanwhile, a data engineer called Fred Benenson pushed things to nosebleed heights by attempting to translate Moby-Dick into emojis. True to the platform age, Benenson did not do the translation work himself, but crowd-sourced it on Amazon Mechanical Turk, where he had thousands of volunteers each translate a little bit of the text. The finished work—Emoji Dick—can be purchased for $200 in hardcover or $5 as a PDF. Meanwhile, Benenson hopes to build an emoji translation engine that will allow all literature to be turned into digi-glyphs.
”
”