Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Theresa M. Towner (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Theresa M. Towner
• Yousef Alhamoudi

Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Theresa M. Towner. University of Virginia Press, 2022. 230 pp. $95 cloth, $35 paper, $22.50 eBook.

No one has defined and demonstrated the potential of digital humanities in navigating literature more than the contributors to Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the Digital Yoknapatawpha Project, commonly referred to as DY, which remains the most technologically sophisticated approach to the works of William Faulkner set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In the introduction to the volume, Theresa M. Towner, who co-directs DY with Johannes Burgers, another contributor, describes how the project "is encoding the texts set in Faulkner's mythical county into a complex database with sophisticated front-end visualizations in order to see what the nascent field of digital humanities can show us about that world and the people who inhabit it" (1–2). In the first set of essays, contributors provide insights into the development of DY. Paying attention to visualization, Burgers shows how different features, such as events, locations, characters, and demographics, can be visible and traceable through DY. Jennie Joiner looks at locations to demonstrate how "DY is an attempt to illuminate all locations in those texts and make information about them transparent and comprehensive" (35). More precisely, Joiner adds that the project "allows us a bird's-eye view of something that we cannot see unless we change our perspective" (43). Given how place-oriented Faulkner's literature remains, Joiner's discussion provides compelling ways to use DY to aid in situating locations. Discussing characters, Christopher Rieger provides examples of the different ways to look at characters in DY, encouraging users to follow the different examples he provides to make larger conclusions about their employment in Faulkner's fiction. The tips and pointers that Rieger provides most certainly allow users of DY to navigate the sheer volume of diverse and complicated characters Faulkner created in telling ways. As for events, Lorie Watkins defines how "an event in DY consists of a [End Page 269] continuous scene—what happens within a single setting, during an unbroken length of time, with one main focus, and an unchanging narrative style" (69–70). Watkins emphasizes "the ability to click from event to event narratively to get a handle on a text during a first reading" (80). I would add "to get a handle on a text" for the few first readings, as my eight-year experience with DY has proven.

In another set of essays, contributors have applied various DY tools in their readings of specific texts as case studies. Using DY to trace trauma in Sanctuary, Ben Robbins accurately "suggest[s] that digital humanities (DH) projects such as DY, which embed speculative and interpretative functions within them, can chart the movements of modernist narratives in revealing new ways" (85). In a crucial essay about a larger debate, Erin Penner reads "Appendix Compson 1699–1945" to describe DY's treatment of the issue of consistency in Faulkner's fiction:

The digital project offers a third way: not Cowley's insistence that discrepancies be resolved, nor Faulkner's refusal to return to earlier work to integrate the worlds he has created. Instead, the data of DY is grounded in particular texts, but it also facilitates comparisons across Faulkner's body of work.

(106)

Focusing on The Hamlet, John Michael Corrigan "provides the reader with an interpretative architecture for using systems theory and the concept of complexity to understand Faulkner's representation of the social body" (125). More specifically, Corrigan concludes that

DY provides a variety of additional features from the location-character graphs that we originally analyzed to heatmaps and to a forthcoming demographic toolkit that lets users slice through the data to quantify the racial and gender makeup of a particular novel or the entirety of the Yoknapatawpha fiction.

(147)

This essay could have benefited from an elaboration of DY's features when applying the different models and theories discussed.

The remaining essays look at various ways DY can be applied...