Digital Yoknapatawpha in the Context of the Digital Humanities

460 Mississippi Quarterly Digital Yoknapatawpha in the Context of the Digital Humanities Elizabeth Cornell Fordham University MOST IN ACADEME ACCEPT THAT THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES IS NOT THE “next big thing” so much as agree that it’s arrived and here to stay (Gold). Fears that this method and practice of humanistic inquiry would hasten the demise of the traditional humanities, supposedly on their way out for years, have not come to fruition (Greteman). If anything, the digital humanities has richly expanded the reach and power of the humanities, within and without academia (Burdick et al. 4). A case in point is Digital Yoknapatawpha,whoseinterlinkeddatabases,maps,andtimelinesafford new ways to think about and explore Faulkner’s work. As a collaborative project involving three dozen editors, DY. engages these scholars in true digital humanities fashion. That is, the editors aren’t cloistered in their respective offices, working independently on one small piece of the project. Rather, they collaborate in small teams to gather information from a text and populate a database. Conversations about this work take place throughout the year, sometimes face-to-face, but more often, online. No one has to wait for a precious, tired minute at the MLA Convention for the opportunity to discuss the project’s next steps with other editors. Moreover, editors also work with programmers, cartographers,graphicdesigners,librarians,andothers.Likemanydigital humanities projects of its scope, DY narrows the divide between disciplines,fostersinterdisciplinarycollaboration,andhasabroadpublic reach. It is a “social undertaking” with an “unusually strong sense of community and common purpose” (Kirschenbaum 56, 58),anethoswell suited for an editorial team deeply passionate about Faulkner. That social aspect does not stop with the editors, however. DY will never sit on a library shelf, waiting to be checked out by a single researcher or student for a limited period of time. DY. is available 24/7, to anyone with an Internet connection. Students and their teachers can use DY to interrogate and interpret Faulkner’s texts, together. Researchers may view DY.’s data together, even if they are on different continents. The DY. project was born in 2011, but its DNA spans more than half a century. The first digital humanities projects began in the late 1940s, 461 Digital Yoknapatawpha when a single computer was housed in a large room, required vacuum tubes to operate, and spat out punch cards.1 By the 1980s, computers had gotten a lot smaller and came with a helpful screen. The tools for creating databases improved and humanities data became more computable. Databases remain an important part of many digital humanities projects today, including DY.2 A database lends itself to textual analysis and cataloging, and the analysis of data organized into fields. Databases became more exciting to more people when the Web emerged in the 1990s, bringing with it a colorful and multidimensional graphical user interface. This development made possible visualization, geospatial representation, simulated space, interactive applications, and network analysis of complex systems (such as a corpora of related texts). In the twenty-first century, new tools for communication and sharing data, such as email, the cloud, and social networking, have made collaboration among far-flung contributors easier, and projects such as DY. can progress more quickly. That’s the highly compressed history of the digital humanities. But what is the digital humanities and why should we care? To answer the latterquestionfirst,DHincorporates traditionalresourceswithnewones forhumanisticinquiryandmakingnewknowledge.Withresearchbeing “mediated through digital technology” to a greater degree than ever before (Berry 1), digital humanities methods “address and engage disparate subject matters across media, language, location, and history” (Burdick et al. 24). Not surprisingly, old humanities questions get new answers, thus opening up new questions. However, as Miriam Posner points out, only the scholar’s knowledge of those questions, as well as related debates and contexts, give meaning to these new insights, thus requiring “a lot of interpretive work.” As you probably gather, digital humanities does not mean copying and pasting text from Wikipedia. It’s not using a learning management system, such as Blackboard, or saving a Word document as a PDF.3 These 1 My discussion of the historical development of the digital humanities is taken from Burdick et al. 2 A related computational method...