He was the hero of hopeless causes and the defender of imaginary damsels. Now fans of Don Quixote, the Spanish literary character who tilted at windmills, are embarking on an appropriately quixotic challenge – to put the entire contents of Don Quixote de La Mancha on the Twitter microblogging site.
The Twijote project, as it is known, aims to publish the 470-odd pages of the first volume of Don Quixote's adventures using just the 140-character blocks of text allowed by Twitter. It has set itself strict rules, of the honourable but potentially foolish kind that Don Quixote and his creator, Miguel de Cervantes, might have approved of.
The 8,200-odd tweets needed to get to the end of the first volume must come from one-off visitors to the Twijote site. They are given the next block of 140 characters of text to put on Twitter.
"We reckon it will take about a year, if people stick with it," said Pablo López, a web designer from the north-western Spanish city of Vigo who thought up the project. "The idea is to show that culture can exist in social media – that it is not just a place for nerds and freaks," he said.
Twijote has no sponsors and no ambition to make money. "It is something we put up to see what would happen," said Lopez, who pulled in web designers from his company to help. "I had the idea one day and came into the office and persuaded people it was worth doing."
Volunteers have signed on from all over Spain and Latin America, with visitors also arriving from non-Spanish speaking countries such as Finland.
Lopez pointed to other literary adventures in Twitterland, including the Serial Chicken novel being published in instalments by Spanish writer Jordi Cervera.
English-language literary Twitter projects include selected musings from Samuel Pepys' 17th century diaries and snippets from the books published in mini-instalments by e-mail and on the internet.
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