Digitizing Faulkner

Book excerpt: For more than eighty years, Faulkner criticism has attempted to "see all Yoknapatawpha," the fictional Mississippi county in which the author set all but four of his novels as well as more than fifty short stories. One of the most ambitious of these attempts is the ongoing Digital Yoknapatawpha, an online project that is encoding the texts set in Faulkner’s mythical county into a complex database with sophisticated front-end visualizations. In Digitizing Faulkner, the contributors to the project share their findings and reflections on what digital research can mean for Faulkner studies and, by example, other bodies of literature. The essays examine Faulkner’s characters, events, locations, and visualizations, as well as offering more theoretical reflections on digitally mapping specific texts and stories, including the pedagogical implications of this digital approach. Digitizing Faulkner explores how a twenty-first-century research tool intersects with twentieth-century sensibilities, ideologies, behaviors, and material cultures to modify and enhance our understanding of Faulkner’s texts. Contributors: Johannes Burgers, Ashoka University * John Michael Corrigan, National Chengchi University, Taiwan * Ren Denton, East Georgia State College * Jennie Joiner, Keuka College * Erin Penner, Asbury University * Stephen Railton, University of Virginia * Christopher Rieger, Southeast Missouri State University * Ben Robbins, University of Innsbruck * Melanie Benson Taylor, Dartmouth College * Lorie Watkins, William Carey University