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Moby Dick – The Aftermath

Dan — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:31:16 +0000

As you probably know, I have been tweeting the entire text of Moby Dick. That’s right, the entire book, word-for-word, in 140 character (max) snippets. Finding myself at the end of the book is a little strange. It’s been there in my Twitter feed since I began late last July. Now it’s over, so I thought I’d reflect and share some tidbits.

It took nine and a half months to tweet the entire book.
I tweeted one paragraph every hour between 8AM and 8PM CST every Monday through Friday. The length of those paragraphs were entirely up to Melville.
It took 12,849 updates to tell the whole story. That’s an average 64 updates per day (I said 45 on Twitter but I was wrong).
I originally thought it would take me about a month or two, but I was oh-so-wrong.
The book was published 158 years ago. It took that long for someone to invent a way that I could handle reading it.
I actually enjoyed reading it in these small snippets. Sometimes it was hard to tell what was going on, but you also ended up with some really hilarious non-sequiturs.
A nearly identical project cropped up a couple of weeks ago by someone with no knowledge of my project. I feel bad that I preempted his (forgive me if that is the wrong pronoun) idea. Perhaps all the people who missed my tweeting could get that going again.
As of the last line of the book, the twitter account had 163 followers. After all the buzz created by the completion of Moby Dick, I now have almost 120 more followers than that (at the time of writing).
I plan to begin the next book on Monday, May 18th (my birthday!). You can vote on which book I should tweet next over at this handy dandy little poll: http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1618811/