Digital Yoknapatawpha: Where We Are

464 Mississippi Quarterly Digital Yoknapatawpha.: Where We Are Theresa M. Towner University of Texas at Dallas A TEAM OF TWENTY-FIVE COLLABORATING EDITORS, AN ADVISORY BOARD of nine, a technical team of twelve, and at least thirteen advisory teachers have been working together in various combinations since 2011 to put Faulkner’s world on the virtual map. As of this writing in mid-April of 2016, we of Digital Yoknapatawpha have entered seven novels and twenty-seven short stories into the database, with three more novelsandothershortfictionsunderway.Thesedatabaseentriestakethe form of 1,076 Locations, 2,234 Characters, and 3,371 Events; the last category is particularly impressive because it includes an accounting for every word of Faulkner’s prose in a given text, keyed to the first eight to ten words of each new Event as it occurs. Those numbers are growing literally every day (some days more than others, of course) according to strict adherence to a set of instructions that ensure uniformity of data entries. The project’s sophisticated data fields were developed and defined early in the project’s history, and like the instructions have been reviewed and revised as necessary over the years. It must be said that data entry is not an intuitive process for the humanist; however, a specialist in data entry per se would not have the scholarly expertise necessary to identify, for example, the range of texts in which a certain character appears or the critical savvy to decide what keywords should be entered for each narrative Event. There is also an extensive system of double-checking that seeks to keep data uniform and informative; at least two collaborating editors verify each category of entry before another check by the project director, Stephen Railton. As we have learned, no choice in the digital world is ever really final. While more texts remain to be edited, we can be encouraged by the sheer numbers we have put on the board. Also encouraging are the search functions and extra-textual resources we have been able to add to the information provided in our drop-down menus. One of the virtues of virtual reality is the ability to look for things quickly; DY. allows its user to look for information almost as fast as you can think to ask for it. For example, a search in Locations for “cabin” produces references in twenty-four texts; “mansion” produces four; “courthouse,” twenty-six. If you search the last item to find out how many of those are destroyed during the course of Events, you 465 Digital Yoknapatawpha discover one text (“Vendée”). A search of mixed-race female Characters produces seven texts; black women, twenty-six; multiracial and multigendered groups, fifteen. As Johannes Burgers explains elsewhere in this roundtable, some of the four trillion visualizations of the available data sets are more worth a reader’s while than others; but it is valuable to be able to chart the various contexts within which characters operate. Eventssearchedofferevenmoreintriguingpossibilitiesforinvestigation: What can one make of the search that produces six hits for “lynching” and sixteen for “marriage”? In how many scenes do Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens appear together, and where are they in Faulkner’s corpus? By asking even impulsive questions, searchers of DY can discover fresh ways into Faulkner’s mythical county and its inhabitants. Perhaps the most exciting recent development in DY. is the addition of the button on the Map Controls bar labeled “Other Resources.” So far, these resources include “Manuscripts, Etc.” and “Audio Clips.” The latter consist of links to Railton’s Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive (http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/), a digitized republication of the audiotapes made during Faulkner’s classroom appearances at the University in 1957 and 1958, along with transcripts of the sometimesmuddled sessions. “Manuscripts, Etc.” can contain, but is not limited to, scansofselectedmanuscriptandtypescriptpagesandillustrations.These pages are curated by scholars, so users can learn about the various problems raised by different stages of the composition and publication of a Faulkner text. DY users can therefore see the omission of a passage from “A Rose for Emily,” for example, in which Tobe makes it clear to Emily that he knows what’s in the...