Panel. Virtualizing Native Soil: Faulkner and the Digital Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

9-7-2012 9:30 AM

Description

  • Why Faulkner and the Digital Humanities Need Each Other: A Short Introduction / Elizabeth Cornell, Fordham University
    The digital humanities are rapidly becoming mainstream in literary studies. This paper will offer some definitions of the digital humanities (as in Faulkner’s work, there are many voices with competing versions of the truth) and pose some questions: What can the digital humanities offer readers and students of Faulkner’s work? What are the implications for reading and studying Faulkner in a digital context? This paper serves as an introduction to the papers on the panel “Virtualizing Native Soil: Faulkner and the Digital Humanities in the Twenty-First Century,” which explores the advantages and challenges of moving Faulkner studies more deeply into this field.
  • Hypertext, the World Wide Web, and the Fiction of William Faulkner: A Backwards-Forwards Look at America's Greatest Postmodern Modernist / John B. Padgett, Brevard College
    This paper examines some of the hypertextual aspects of Faulkner’s fiction and how they have been regarded over the years as possible avenues for better appreciating Faulkner’s work. It provides a brief history of how I came to create my Faulkner website, William Faulkner on the Web, in 1995, including the original goals of the project, the expansion of those goals as I began to grasp the digital humanities potential of literary websites such as this one, and the many challenges of writing and maintaining the site for the past 17 years. The paper then looks forward to other ways that information technology has been and may continue to be used effectively in better understanding, interpreting, and teaching Faulkner.
  • Digitizing Yoknapatawpha: Progress Report on a Work in Progress / Stephen Railton, University of Virginia
    The focus of the presentation will be the new "Digital Yoknapatawpha" project that I began building last summer, with technical support from several organizations at the University of Virginia and the advisory, editorial and curatorial assistance of a group of Faulkner scholars from around the country. We're in the earliest stages of what will be a multi-year endeavor. I'll be showing a demo version of the project to date, and looking for feedback and suggestions for further features, but one main goal of the presentation will be to try to recruit additional Faulknerians for the project.
  • Journey to the Center of Yoknapatawpha: An Experience of Digitizing Faulkner's Fiction / Taylor Hagood, Florida Atlantic University
    Digital Yoknapatawpha is a radically different approach to engaging William Faulkner and his work on the internet. There have been other projects: William Faulkner on the Web, the Hypertext Sound and the Fury, and any number of other sites that at one time or another have made Faulkner a web presence. They were and are innovative, finding ways to exploit links to archives, videos, sound clips, and other materials to offer guides to Faulkner’s world. Digital Yoknapatawpha follows suit by offering a guide to Faulkner’s places, since the user can choose works to explore and then select locations, characters, topography, and, most importantly “events” to gain a concrete sense of the places, people, and movements of Faulkner’s fiction. But there is more at work in this website and the potentials it unlocks and points to. I want to talk about my experience helping to develop this site and to ponder how it particularly opens the way for something that moves beyond digital humanities scholarship of the guideline variety to actual critical approaches opened up by the kinds of spatiality peculiar to digital, web-based platforms. My presentation will consider Digital Yoknapatawpha as representing a kind of literary criticism in that it represents an interpretation of Faulkner’s work and world; the website’s very design raises questions about the work, and the specific treatments of Faulkner’s works in it amount to interpretive visual essays. This innovative platform represents not just a new way of approaching Faulkner—it also offers glimpses at the interpretive potentials unique to the digital scholarship.

Relational Format

Conference proceeding

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Jul 9th, 9:30 AM

Panel. Virtualizing Native Soil: Faulkner and the Digital Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

Nutt Auditorium

  • Why Faulkner and the Digital Humanities Need Each Other: A Short Introduction / Elizabeth Cornell, Fordham University
    The digital humanities are rapidly becoming mainstream in literary studies. This paper will offer some definitions of the digital humanities (as in Faulkner’s work, there are many voices with competing versions of the truth) and pose some questions: What can the digital humanities offer readers and students of Faulkner’s work? What are the implications for reading and studying Faulkner in a digital context? This paper serves as an introduction to the papers on the panel “Virtualizing Native Soil: Faulkner and the Digital Humanities in the Twenty-First Century,” which explores the advantages and challenges of moving Faulkner studies more deeply into this field.
  • Hypertext, the World Wide Web, and the Fiction of William Faulkner: A Backwards-Forwards Look at America's Greatest Postmodern Modernist / John B. Padgett, Brevard College
    This paper examines some of the hypertextual aspects of Faulkner’s fiction and how they have been regarded over the years as possible avenues for better appreciating Faulkner’s work. It provides a brief history of how I came to create my Faulkner website, William Faulkner on the Web, in 1995, including the original goals of the project, the expansion of those goals as I began to grasp the digital humanities potential of literary websites such as this one, and the many challenges of writing and maintaining the site for the past 17 years. The paper then looks forward to other ways that information technology has been and may continue to be used effectively in better understanding, interpreting, and teaching Faulkner.
  • Digitizing Yoknapatawpha: Progress Report on a Work in Progress / Stephen Railton, University of Virginia
    The focus of the presentation will be the new "Digital Yoknapatawpha" project that I began building last summer, with technical support from several organizations at the University of Virginia and the advisory, editorial and curatorial assistance of a group of Faulkner scholars from around the country. We're in the earliest stages of what will be a multi-year endeavor. I'll be showing a demo version of the project to date, and looking for feedback and suggestions for further features, but one main goal of the presentation will be to try to recruit additional Faulknerians for the project.
  • Journey to the Center of Yoknapatawpha: An Experience of Digitizing Faulkner's Fiction / Taylor Hagood, Florida Atlantic University
    Digital Yoknapatawpha is a radically different approach to engaging William Faulkner and his work on the internet. There have been other projects: William Faulkner on the Web, the Hypertext Sound and the Fury, and any number of other sites that at one time or another have made Faulkner a web presence. They were and are innovative, finding ways to exploit links to archives, videos, sound clips, and other materials to offer guides to Faulkner’s world. Digital Yoknapatawpha follows suit by offering a guide to Faulkner’s places, since the user can choose works to explore and then select locations, characters, topography, and, most importantly “events” to gain a concrete sense of the places, people, and movements of Faulkner’s fiction. But there is more at work in this website and the potentials it unlocks and points to. I want to talk about my experience helping to develop this site and to ponder how it particularly opens the way for something that moves beyond digital humanities scholarship of the guideline variety to actual critical approaches opened up by the kinds of spatiality peculiar to digital, web-based platforms. My presentation will consider Digital Yoknapatawpha as representing a kind of literary criticism in that it represents an interpretation of Faulkner’s work and world; the website’s very design raises questions about the work, and the specific treatments of Faulkner’s works in it amount to interpretive visual essays. This innovative platform represents not just a new way of approaching Faulkner—it also offers glimpses at the interpretive potentials unique to the digital scholarship.