Person
Every book Fred Benenson recommended on podcasts
Fred Benenson appeared on the a16z Podcast, where he discussed his internet art project Emoji Dick and its relationship to Herman Melville's classic novel Moby-Dick. Benenson explained that he considered public-domain texts for a crowdsourced emoji translation experiment and ultimately chose Moby-Dick because it was a famously long and challenging work consisting of roughly ten thousand sentences, making it a fittingly inappropriate and ambitious choice. He described hiring Mechanical Turk workers to translate portions of the novel into emoji, noting that the results of the first chapter were hilarious. Benenson also discussed how the opening sentence of the book, 'Call me Ishmael,' appeared on the project's website as a cover example. Furthermore, he recounted being contacted by the Library of Congress in 2013, when they acquired Emoji Dick as their first emoji book, an event he considered a significant milestone for the project. Throughout the discussions, Benenson reflected on the intersection of classic literature, crowdsourcing, and digital communication.
Books recommended by Fred Benenson
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MOBY-DICK; or, THE WHALE
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is an epic American novel that chronicles the obsessive, self-destructive quest of Captain Ahab to hunt down the giant white whale that maimed him.
Discussed“For a moment I thought about the Bible and I was like, that's too obvious. What's like what's like totally even more inappropriate? So, Moby Dick came to mind. it came to mind as like this this like impossible book”
Where to get it
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How to Speak Emoji
Discussed“When I did Emoji Dick, it was more of an experiment around crowdsourcing an emoji itself. Like I wasn't like so much interested in making a formal case that emoji could be a”
Where to get it
Books Fred Benenson wrote
Appearances
| Episode | Podcast | Date | Books |
|---|---|---|---|
| a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji | a16z Podcast | 2016-08-03 | 5 |
| a16z Podcast: Not all Network Effects Are Created Equal | a16z Podcast | 2016-08-01 | 3 |
Other mentions (4: passing, ad reads, own books)
“And then I was like, well, maybe I can translate a book in emoji. I was like, okay, what books would work? And I was like, well, it has to be in the public domain”
“So, I worked on it for, you know, nights and weekends for another like eight or nine months, and then, you know, Yeah. self-published it on lulu.com. You can still buy it. It gets printed on demand”
“for a moment I thought about the Bible and I was like that's too obvious what's like what's like totally even more inappropriate the movie dick games yeah they came to mind”
“and this is my favorite part is that it's somehow listed as a translation of Moby Dick so when you look up emoji dick it says all these libraries have it because it's really just saying that like they have a translation”