The UVA Today article, “UVA Spearheads Effort to Digitally Map Faulkner’s Literary World,” features a collaboration between UVA English Professor Stephen Railton and digital specialists—including staff of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) and the Library’s Digital Media Lab—to create a Digital Yoknapatawpha, an interactive website, mapping the fictional Mississippi County invented by William Faulkner as the setting of his most famous fiction. According to Railton, scholars will now be able “to locate scenes … chronologically in the contexts of both the history of Yoknapatawpha and the arc of Faulkner’s career.”

Faulkner’s own map drawings of his imaginary world—from which the project’s cartographers constructed separate maps linked to his fiction—came from the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library’s repository of the author’s papers.

Railton has worked with the Special Collections library before on Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive to make available online the taped recordings of Faulkner reading from his work, giving lectures, and answering questions. The recordings were made during Faulkner’s tenure as the Balch Writer-in-Residence at UVA (1957–58).

The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library will present an exhibition of material from the Faulkner collection from February through July of 2017.

Read the full article: UVA Spearheads Effort to Digitally Map Faulkner’s Literary World (UVA Today, 8/15/2016)