These two-part graphs provide a colorful way to visualize the relationships between Characters and Locations in a specific text. The Characters are displayed in alphabetical order on the graph's left side; on the right, also arranged alphabetically, are the Locations where those Characters appear or are mentioned. The lines that connect them are coded by the colors assigned to each Character. The colors are assigned randomly, but the width of the line provides a crude representation of the number of Events in which the Character and the Location are connected. Here, for example, is a section of the bi-partite graph displaying the connections among the 273 Characters in Flags in the Dust and the novel's 77 Locations:

As you can see, for a novel - or even for most of Faulkner's short stories - the graph is often too complex to be readable. But by using the filters, you can isolate the elements you're interested in. Here, for example, is the representation of the Characters in "A Rose for Emily" who are connected with the Grierson house as a "Specific Location" - and note again how the width of the line width provides a crude way to measure which characters are the most frequently connected with that location:

You can also select individual Characters from any graph by clicking on their name or icon. Below is a detail from that cumulative Flags graph in which we've clicked on Bryon Snopes:

When all the Locations appear, you will have to scroll to see all the places Byron appears. But as shown in the graph above, one of the valuable things about these cumulative displays is that they include the Locations with which a Character is not connected. This kind of information can be illuminating, as I realized when I decided to see what this program could tell me about the Snopes family in Faulkner's first published Yoknapatawpha fiction. I knew he had set aside the "Father Abraham" manuscript, which focuses on Flem and his "poor white" family and their growing presence in Jefferson, to write Flags, where the focus is instead on the Sartorises and Benbows, two of the county's oldest and most aristocratic families. That sequence made me curious to see what the data could reveal about the place - or rather, the places - that he assigned "Snopeses" in this second story. Here's how I first searched for that:

Most of the connections are to the places where one might expect to find Snopeses: Frenchman's Bend, where they're from (Turpin's Farm, Varner's Store), and the places in town where they live or work (Beard Hotel, I.O.'s House, Power Plant, etc.). But I confess it came as a surprise to see that two of the novel's ten Snopeses - Montgomery Ward and Bryon - are associated with the Benbow House, which seemed to suggest that the two extremes of Yoknapatawpha's white population - the traditional aristocracy and the parvenu lower class - can meet on common ground. But then I realized I was using the graph's default "Either" selection, which brings up the places where the characters either appear or are mentioned. So I cleared the search form and searched again just for the Locations where Snopeses are "Present" in an event.

The change was slight, but significant. Physically, the Snopeses are now more definitely segregated into fewer places. Seeing this revised graph reminded me that Montgomery Ward is only "Mentioned" at the Benbows, and dismissively at that. However, Byron's lines still cross over into the most varied set of Locations, including the Benbow house. But thinking about the line that connected him to the Benbow house prompted me to recall the single time he gets inside that location: when he breaks into Narcissa's bedroom in the dark to steal from her underwear drawer. This "crossing over" is literally a "trespass," a violation of the law. And that made me realize that the other upper class location he is associated with - the Sartoris Bank where he works for much of the novel - also becomes the scene of a crime, when he breaks in there in the dark to steal from the safe. Ultimately, in other words, Faulkner criminalizes Bryon's presence in these places, which is a very dramatic way to police the line that separates the Old South, as embodied by Sartorises and Benbows and their spaces, from the New, embodied by the way Snopeses violate those spaces. I'm not exaggerating to say that this gave me a new way to appreciate what "Yoknapatawpha" gave Faulkner. He could not change the new reality that modernity was forcing on the world he lived in, but in the world he created he could resist and even try to control those kinds of social changes, just as Bryon's "presence" at the Benbows and the Bank in the end results in his having to run back to Frenchman's Bend before exiting the novel, and its spaces, entirely.

You can graph the texts in the other direction too. Below top: a detail from the cumulative Flags graph in which the Sartoris Plantation has been isolated. What you can see are some of the 44 Characters who are "Present" at least once at that Location. What you can't see, because of the size of the graph, but what you probably won't be surprised to learn, is that none of the novel's Snopeses ever appear at Sartoris, the imaginative shrine that the text builds to the best values of the Old South. I'll show you how that absence is made visible on this graph by providing a second detail from it, below bottom.

It's just a coincidence that "General Sherman" appears along with the Snopeses at this point in the alphabet, but worth noting that, while in the novel Colonel Sartoris can rebuild his plantation house after Sherman's Yankees burn it down, in writing the novel Faulkner can keep that other invasive presence, Snopesism, from ever getting near Sartoris.

      Citing this page:
Bingler, Robbie, Worthy Martin, and Stephen Railton, "About Bi-Partite Graphs," Digital Yoknapatawpha, University of Virginia, http://faulkner.drupal.shanti.virginia.edu/node/17681?canvas (Date added to project: 2019)