digital Yoknapatawpha

A Collaboration of Faulkner Scholars with
the University of Virginia's Digital Media Lab,
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
and SHANTI

The project centers on William Faulkner's 15 novels and 48 stories, written between 1926 and 1960 and set in the mythical Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. The prototype models a way to enter every character, location and event from the individual texts into a robust database and then to map that data into an atlas of interactive visual resources, so that users can better understand and study the acts of narrative re-creation Faulkner undertook, according to the demands of a particular story. The project ultimately aims to link the entire body of Yoknapatawpha fictions together and dynamically generate new, cumulative maps. These will enable scholars or students to study, for example, all black inhabitants and the roles they play in his texts, or Faulkner's representations of violence, or religion, or family.