Digital Yoknapatawpha
FAIN: HD-51774-13
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Stephen Railton (Project Director: October 2012 to July 2014)
The development of an expanded prototype that allows for the mapping and study of William Faulker's fiction that took place in the imaginary county of 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.