Encoding Yoknapatawpha: Considering Faulkner in the Information Age

Abstract

470 Mississippi Quarterly Encoding Yoknapatawpha: Considering Faulkner in the Information Age John Michael Corrigan National Chengchi University IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES, I DISCUSS DIGITAL YOKNAPATAWPHA AS AN accessible and transparent online database that significantly preserves the interpretative possibilities central to experiencing Faulkner’s fiction. I consider three characteristics of DY.’s value as a scholarly resource, beginning with my own experience of how such a project can connect a community of scholars across enormous distances and examining the role that DY. can play in engaging established and aspiring international scholars in Faulkner studies. Finally, I indicate the opportunity that DY. presents to consider Faulkner’s works not simply in terms of the critical concerns of the Information Age, but as dynamic and far-reaching anticipations of these concerns. I have been a member of DY since the summer of 2013, months before I moved abroad to take a faculty position in a Taiwanese research university. When previous generations of scholars migrated to other areas of the world, this often meant the loss of community as well as of the scholarly engagement that such a loss entailed. By contrast, my involvement in DY. has allowed me to work closely with a community of Faulkner scholars in a way that would have been impossible in the past. I continue to collaborate in the development and encoding of our visual database and to engage a community of scholars and students here inAsiaboththroughworkshoppingDY. atvarious universities and in my own graduate classrooms. Serving in an academic environment with its own needs and challenges, I am frequently impressed by how DY can be used to strengthen traditional humanistic inquiry. In a basic way, DY. involves access to information that with traditional scholarship would be spread out across hundreds of books and journals. As we have seen, this data is arranged according to the locations, characters, and events of the Yoknapatawpha canon and increasingly includes manuscript and archival materials as well. We are in the early stages of planning an additional resource that would cross-reference the data of the Yoknapatawpha canon with related scholarship. We have attempted, furthermore, to make our decision-making as transparent as possible, with any major decisions discussed in the “About the Text” popup and 471 Digital Yoknapatawpha all locations featuring an “Authority” data entry that details whether we have based sites on Faulkner’s map, the text as interpreted, or speculation. The tactile visuality of the encoded maps thereby offers users a range of data choices that are largely transparent and highlights the fact that our visualizations are one possible interpretation of Faulkner’s works, as opposed to popular online summaries and critiques that often portray the meaning of the text as something already established. Most importantly, the interface itself connects data visualizations directly to the texts themselves, so that, in each case, the users can locate the page or pages upon which our interpretation of Faulkner’s cosmos is based. This means that, first and foremost, DY. presentsavirtualpeer-editedcompanionforengagingFaulkner’swriting that does not tell users how to interpret the texts. For me, these qualities of accessibility to hard data, transparency of decision-making, and valuing interpretative openness best highlight DY.’s promise as a tool for scholars and for students in the classroom. In the DY workshops I gave this past year at two universities in Taiwan, I addressed an audience enthusiastic for a visual database encoding such a complex artistic vision, but I also repeatedly addressed concerns from scholars and graduate students about whether we are diluting the aesthetic power of Faulkner’s prose with digital crutches or simply doing the next fashionable thing. My assurance to them was that the long-term value of DY. for scholarship also involves articulating whatFaulkner’sownartisticvisioncantellusaboutthe technologyupon which we now depend. With the traditional forms of scholarship that will grow up alongside DY, we have the opportunity to clarify how Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha anticipates or even coincides with the data technologies of our own time. DY. provides scholars and students with more than just a compilation of information. It potentially presents an interactive medium reflective of a twentieth-century global culture on the brink of the Information Age, a culture grappling with...