“Emoji Dick is a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into [...] emoji.
Each of the book’s approximately 10,000 sentences has been translated three times by a[n] Amazon Mechanical Turk worker. These results have been voted upon by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence has been selected for inclusion in this book. In total, over eight hundred people spent approximately 3,795,980 seconds working to create this book. Each worker was paid five cents per translation and two cents per vote per translation. The funds to pay the Amazon Turk workers and print the initial run of this book were raised from eighty three people over the course of thirty days using the funding platform Kickstarter” (blurb on Lulu).
Fred Benenson can be considered a pioneer in the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk and its (algo-)Taylorist principles in the literary field. In search of “the craziest thing I could get Mechanical Turk to do” (Fred Benenson, “Emoji Dick,” talk), Benenson decided on a translation experiment. In keeping with the production principle, the novel is presented in individual sentences within the book: emoji translation and English original following each other. As Lisa Gitelman notes in “Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale,” the subtitle that uses the emoji for whale is difficult to index in bibliographies and library catalogs. We too have “back translated” it into English: “Or the whale.”
The 812 crowdworkers are listed in the acknowledgments at the end of the book on eleven pages—not with their real names, but with their alphanumeric MTurk usernames, such as A106Q3N3OECN73. So they remain invisible, anonymous cogs in the wheel, adapted to the digital workflows right down to their names, while the eighty-three crowd-funders—in the style of subscription lists of earlier centuries—are all listed by name. Here, one crowd pays the other, and at the same time a two-class society is clearly created. However, these invisible workers can gain autonomy, as Zach Whalen notes. He found that a certain sequence of nine emojis was used a total of 439 times, corresponding to “about 4.5% of the total work.” This suggests that a “Turk” was trying to trick the system and increase his own hourly rate by “copy pasting the same sequence over and over again” (Zach Whalen, “Some Notes”).
There are two versions of the book: one in black-and-white for $40 and one in color for $200. The project has received widespread media attention and has also been acquired by a surprising number of libraries—usually in the more expensive color version. Benenson celebrated its acquisition by the Library of Congress as a high accolade and its inclusion in the “HELP/LESS” exhibition, curated by Chris Habib, at Printed Matter 2013 as its official recognition as art: “This is kind of a big deal because I think it means Emoji Dick can now be considered a work of art” (Fred Benenson, “Emoji Dick is Officially Art”).
On Lulu, it is one of the few books that has received reviews. Only one of them, however, recommends it as a gift; the other reviewers criticize the poorly readable black-and-white version and the inadequate book preview, which shows only twelve pages and thus only the preface, but not a single page with the emojis themselves. In the meantime, Lulu has even eliminated the book preview altogether, which is detrimental to browsing and discovering new books.
