Forget family nights with board games. For NYU instructor Fred Benenson, family bonding means texting and decoding challenging Emoji sentences to one another. It's like Pictionary with a twist.

In his latest project, Benenson will translate all 6,438 sentences of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" into Emoji icons. (Essentially, Emoji are picture characters used in Japanese text messaging.)

Benenson said the goal of his project, titled "Emoji Dick," is to demonstrate how large of a role digital technology can play in human expression. According to Benenson, our way of communication is undergoing constant change and modernization through mediums such as Twitter, text messages and Facebook. So, why not Emoji icons?

"I chose 'Moby Dick' because it's just such a totally weird juxtaposition, to take a literary classic and force it into this strange medium," Benenson said.

He grinned, then added that it was also because the novel's copyright had expired, leaving it in the public domain.

Emoji was originally an iPhone application, so Benenson wrote the software for it to be translated on a computer. Since the project began, he has worked with Amazon Mechanical Turk to finish the translation, which is slated for completion in six months.

After translating the first couple of sentences from "Moby Dick," Benenson pitched his idea to Kickstarter, a funding platform for artists. To fund the production, Benenson raised $3,676, just over his goal of $3,500. He said some of the donations were as high as $200.

Not everyone has been supportive of Emoji Dick.

"The first day that I pitched it online, all these people just started ripping it to shreds," Benenson said. "They were like, 'How could you ask people to give you money for a pointless project like this, in times like these?' About one in every five people liked the idea."

But he added: "There's definitely a small percentage of the population that understands this is an interesting, funny project."

CAS freshman William Lee likes the concept.

"I think it's really cool to translate a novel through this kind of filter," Lee said.

College of Nursing sophomore Wenhui Xiao disagreed.

"Moby's eloquent words articulate ideas in a much smoother way than pictures," Xiao said. "Melville's ideas will be lost in the Emoji translation."

Benenson himself said he experienced the same conflict during the translating process.

"I sympathized with people who said prose is impossible to convey in emoticons, because 'Moby Dick' is such a good book," Benenson said.

He explained that it's definitely possible to communicate the poignancy of the story — just in a different form.