For more than eighty years, Faulkner criticism has attempted to ""see all Yoknapatawpha,"" the fictional Mississippi county in which the author set all but four of his novels as well as more than fifty short stories. One of the most ambitious of these attempts is the ongoing Digital Yoknapatawpha, an online project that is encoding the texts set in Faulkner’s mythical county into a complex database with sophisticated front-end visualizations. In Digitizing Faulkner, the contributors to the project share their findings and reflections on what digital research can mean for Faulkner studies and, by example, other bodies of literature.

The essays examine Faulkner’s characters, events, locations, and visualizations, as well as offering more theoretical reflections on digitally mapping specific texts and stories, including the pedagogical implications of this digital approach. Digitizing Faulkner explores how a twenty-first-century research tool intersects with twentieth-century sensibilities, ideologies, behaviors, and material cultures to modify and enhance our understanding of Faulkner’s texts.

This book offers new ways of thinking about the demographics of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha, fresh insights into Faulkner’s adaptation of modernist narrative techniques, and a substantial modification of our understanding of the various themes and events in Faulkner’s work—not only in the major novels but throughout his larger oeuvre. The collection’s most unique contribution, however, is in demonstrating how digital humanities projects can both enable and meaningfully inform carefully researched scholarship in traditional formats. Digitizing Faulkner makes and signals significant headway in fulfilling the promise of digital humanities."- Wes Hamrick, Digital Humanities Fellow, Greenhouse Studio, University of Connecticut

Theresa M. Towner is Ashbel Smith Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner.