Fred Benenson created Emoji Dick, a 2010 project translating Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick into emoji.
Benenson organized the project as a crowdsourced translation experiment. Human contributors translated passages from the novel, and the results were compiled into a book containing emoji interpretations of the complete text. The work was intended both as an artistic experiment and as a way to test how visual symbols could represent complex language.
The project is often described as a translation of Moby-Dick, whose full title is Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. It did not replace the original novel with a standardized emoji language; instead, it explored ambiguity, context, and the limits of pictographs.
Emoji Dick is also notable as an early large-scale cultural project involving emoji, predating many later emoji-focused books, films, and data studies.