An NYU researcher received grant funding to rewrite all 438 sentences Herman Melville’s Moby Dick using Japanese emoticons. Fred Berenson, the researcher, plans to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to obtain three different interpretations from each sentence. From there, each sentence will be voted on and one will be chosen.

When asked why he chose Moby Dick as the book to be translated, Mr. Berenson stated that he needed a public domain book and one that was fairly long in order to demonstrate the the capability of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.