Digital Yoknapatawpha

Digital Yoknapatawpha is a new means to interrogate the fiction that Faulkner wrote between 1926 and 1960 about his mythical county. The current prototype, built by PI Railton and a national team of Faulkner scholars in collaboration with the digital humanities technologists at UVA, models a way to enter every character, location and event in single texts into a robust database, and map that data into an atlas of interactive visual resources. Our proposal will extend this prototype to enable inter-textual study of all the Yoknapatawpha fiction. This enlargement will deploy the exceptional capacities of digital humanities to make the study of Faulkner’s engagement with a particular place and major issues in American history as dynamic as his repeated returns to it and them. The extended design will provide students with new means to appreciate Faulkner’s art, and scholars with transformative digital pathways to research all that his work can reveal about literature and culture

Digital Yoknapatawpha: A Progress Report on a Work in Progress

Box lunch available. Underway since 2011, the NEH-sponsored Digital Yoknapatawpha project is a collaboration of over two dozen Faulkner scholars from around the country and the world and a team of technologists at the University of Virginia. It is being designed to provide new modes of exploring and appreciating all the fictions that Faulkner set in his mythical county. At this presentation we’ll showcase the current state of the project, with special emphasis on its usefulness as both a scholarly and a pedagogical resource. We’ll display how it works, how it can assist with critical research, and how it can help teachers and students in the classroom. We also hope to enlist some additional collaborators, especially teachers who are willing to try it in their own classrooms. We’re anxious to learn how it works with real users as we continue to develop it

Digital Yoknapatawpha: A Progress Report on a Work in Progress

Box lunch is available

Digital Yoknapatawpha in 2017 and Beyond

The Digital Yoknapatawpha project (http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu) continues to grow. In this year’s three-part presentation, director Steve Railton will provide an update on progress and new features, and then ask for help from the attendees with the major new phase that, thanks to an NEH grant, we are undertaking over the coming year: creating search protocols to enable the project to serve the interests of scholars, teachers, students and Faulkner aficionados as fully as possible. John Corrigan will present a brief overview of the scholarship that the project team has produced thus far and sketch some ideas for further research and publication, from applications of the project’s current data-driven analysis to more theoretical considerations about Yoknapatawpha as a complex system. Lorie Watkins will demonstrate the project’s value as a pedagogical resource that supplements the way students engage Faulkner beyond the borders of the classroom