DY Videos
This page gathers together the various video demonstrations that appear under the "Demo" link on different pages throughout Digital Yoknapatawpha. It's easier to explain an interactive, non-linear, multi-layered project like DY if we can show it in action at the same time we're talking about it, so we recommend these videos as perhaps the best way to learn how you can take advantage of this resource to study and teach the world Faulkner created.
We've organized the videos into four categories, though when appropriate a video is listed in more than one category. You can play each of them directly on this page, or follow the link to "DY context" to play it on the specific page where it appears. For example, using this option for any of the DY Program Demos will allow you to test a function like Bi-Partite graphing for yourself after viewing the demo; or accessing any of the Teaching Videos in this context lets you see how the scholar who created the video introduces and explains it.
If you want to see additional examples of how DY's resources can be used, several entries below include a list of the videos in the "Teaching Videos" section that employ particular features as part of their own demos, along with the specific times inside the video when you can view that feature in action. For example, under the main "text map" demo below you'll find "Robbins, Using DY to Analyze "A Rose for Emily" as a Gothic Literary Work [0:00-5:09]" along with two other references; if you scroll down to Ben Robbins' teaching "Emily" video and play the first 6 minutes of it, you'll see another presentation on using the text maps.
Unless otherwise specified, these videos were produced by Stephen Railton.
GETTING STARTED | DY PROGRAM DEMOS | TEACHING VIDEOS | PRESENTATIONS
GETTING STARTED
The first four demos here are intended to provide new users with an overview of the project as a re-presentation of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fictions and a set of tools for digging into them. The 5th demo, by John Padgett, is from the Teaching Videos section; its first 5 minutes introduce the Gothic as a fictional genre, but the next 10 (5:04-14:32) provide a clear and effective demonstration of how to use DY’s text maps.
A brief orientation tour of Digital Yoknapatawpha [4:37]
This video is designed to show new users what to do once they arrive at the project’s homepage. It uses the example of a new arrival who wants to see how DY can help appreciate As I Lay Dying.
Another introduction [11:32]
This video was produced in 2016 as the first of DY’s annual contributions to the Teaching Faulkner Newsletter, published by the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State. DY looked different in those days and contained only a third of the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but the functions this video demonstrates remain the same. Although it's addressed explicitly to teachers of “A Rose for Emily,” others should find its tour of the text map and Other Resources useful.
Using the text-map pages [11:00]
This video shows how DY maps each of Faulkner's fictions in time and space, and how its "deep" maps and their digital functionalities afford multiple ways to appreciate a single text as well as the larger world of Yoknapatawpha. The video focuses on Faulkner's first fiction about his imagined county – Flags in the Dust – but applies equally to the other 67 novels and stories that constitute the larger Yoknapatawpha story. The "Demo" links on all 68 text map pages link to this one video.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/?text=FD
See also: Robbins, Using DY to Analyze "A Rose for Emily" as a Gothic Literary Work [0:00-5:09]; Railton, Space and Time in The Sound and the Fury, Video 1 [0:00-5:40]; Penner, Using Digital Yoknapatawpha to Compare Interpretive Lenses for As I Lay Dying, Video 1 [0:00-2:12]
Searching with DY – coming soon...
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/events/
See also: Robbins, Using DY to Analyze "A Rose for Emily" as a Gothic Literary Work [6:31-8:22]; Railton, Space and Time in The Sound and the Fury, Video 1 [5:40-7:37]; Penner, Using DY When You Only Know 1 Faulkner Story [0:00-6:43]
Using DY to Analyze Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! as a Gothic Text [19:18]
As part of its 20-minute demonstration of how he uses DY in a class on Southern Gothic, John Padgett's video also provides an excellent 10-minute introduction to the affordances of DY's text maps (5:04-14:32).
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-padgettaa.php
DY PROGRAM DEMOS
The first 4 videos here demonstrate tools in the project's Visualizations section. The 5th, a second video about Character-Character force-directed graphing, is in Teaching & Learning. The 6th – Genealogies – is in Commentaries. Each of these videos affords its own opportunity to reconceptualize Faulkner's fictions, visually and dynamically. At first they might seem to take us a long way away from the fictions themselves, but these demos can help you appreciate how to use them as potential interpretative pathways into Faulkner's world.
Force-Directed Location-Character Graphs [5:58]
Force-directed graphing can look incredibly complex at first, but this video focuses on Light in August (97 Locations, 270 Characters) to show you how to deploy the tool's available functions and filters to curate the way it displays the interconnections between places and people in a text, and so use your own reading and research questions to control what the graph can reveal about the text.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/characters-force.html
See also: Railton, Space and Time in The Sound and the Fury, Video 3 [3:35-6:10]
Bi-Partite Location-Character Graphs [4:21]
Like the previous Force-Directed graph, this tool lets you visualize the connections between a text's Locations and Characters, but in a very different way. This demo uses The Sound and the Fury (179 Characters, 77 Locations) to show you how to use the available filters to see how much (or, of course, how little!) this kind of visual re-conception might enable you to discover about a Faulkner novel or story.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/characters-bipart.html
See also: Robbins, Using DY to Analyze "Rose for Emily" as a Gothic Literary Work [5:20-6:22]
Force-Directed Character-Character Graphs 1 [4:25]
These graphs display the links between and among a text's cast of characters. The demo focuses on Light in August (270 Characters) to explain how you can create and curate a graph to see what visualizing a story's interrelationships this way can suggest about it.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/char-char-force.html
Force-Directed Character-Character Graphs 2 [3:32]
This is one of the 5 short videos Johannes Burgers created about using various elements of DY to teach "A Rose for Emily." It provides additional examples of this visualization tool in action, and more ideas about what its re-presentation of a text can reveal.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-burgersre.php
MapIt [3:02]
This feature, which is available at both the Event and Character Search pages, allows you to curate your own visualizations of the various kinds of data in our Location, Character and Event databases. The 3-minute video you can see here, for example, shows how you can create an animated map of Quentin Compson's wanderings around Cambridge on the last day of his life – as DY's scholars have reconstructed that odyssey.
Genealogies [7:29]
Unlike the static diagrams of Faulkner's major families that are a staple of print scholarship, DY's genealogical charts deploy the capacities of electronic technology to illustrate how the fictions construct and reconstruct these families as Faulkner's project changes over time. This video focuses on the Sartoris family to demonstrate how to engage with these multi-layered, interactive charts, and to suggest how much the ability to view Yoknapatawpha's major families dynamically can reveal about Faulkner's evolving project as a writer.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/
TEACHING VIDEOS
The videos in this category can all be found in the Teaching & Learning section of DY. They're designed to give teachers specific examples of how they can incorporate the project into their lessons on some of the most frequently taught Yoknapatawpha texts – though the kinds of deployments they model can certainly be adapted for use with other texts. All these videos include the option to display the audio in subtitles; use the CC button on the video player.
Using DY to Analyze "A Rose for Emily" as a Gothic Literary Work [8:34]
This video by Benjamin Robbins develops a specific reading of the short story in the context of Gothic, and especially Southern Gothic, conventions, but in doing so he demonstrates how to use a number of DY's functions to open up digital pathways into the text. Among the functions he discusses in some detail are the project's text maps, the Narrative Analysis program, Bi-Partite Graphs, and the Event Search engine, especially Event Keywords and the MapIt feature.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-robbinsemily.php
Using DY to Explore the Many Readings of "A Rose for Emily"
Johannes Burgers created these 5 short videos to demonstrate how to use a wide range of DY's functions and features to teach Faulkner's best-known short story. Each tutorial introduces a tool, and couples this with a series of questions about "A Rose for Emily" that guide students to a particular topic. Together the 5 form a single lesson plan for 5 student groups, but each video can also be used with students by itself.
1. Manuscripts [2:52]
This video looks at pages from the manuscript, the typescript and the published text of "Emily" to explore the significance of a striking passage that was ultimately deleted from the version of the story readers see. It gives students a way to think about Faulkner's writing process, and teachers information about how to access the additional rich archive of "Manuscripts, Etc."
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-burgersre.php
2. Audios [2:33]
This video looks first at the way DY allows students to hear what Faulkner himself said about "Emily" while he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia in the late 1950s, along with how a teacher can use Faulkner's comments to provoke discussions of the work. It ends by offering an overview of DY's companion online resource, the audio archive Faulkner at Virginia.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-burgersre.php
3. Character-Character Force Directed Graphs [3:32]
This video looks closely at how students can create and curate one of DY's visualization tools to provide multiple ways to explore the narrative and thematic patterns in a story like "Emily." It ends by explaining how the graphs can be exported from DY for use in an essay or assignment.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-burgersre.php
4. Photographs [2:46]
This video looks both broadly and in specific detail at the project's gallery of historic photographs of Mississippi to explain how, though they should not be seen as illustrations or representations of the world Faulkner's prose creates, they can nonetheless give modern students visual access to that world.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-burgersre.php
5. Narrative Analysis Program [8:30]
This video describes how to use the powerful visualization tool that Burgers himself created to create new ways to study the narrative features and techniques Faulkner deploys as a writer. It focuses on "A Rose for Emily," but broadens out to include other texts. Students will learn how to read and use the tool to open windows into both how a Faulkner story works, and how its meanings are embedded in its techniques.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-burgersre.php
See also: Robbins, "Using Digital Yoknapatawpha to Analyze 'A Rose for Emily' as a Gothic Literary Work" [2:50-3:52]; Penner, Using Digital Yoknapatawpha to Compare Interpretive Lenses for As I Lay Dying, Video 2 [0:00-2:20]
Space and Time in The Sound and the Fury
Stephen Railton created these 3 videos to try doing 2 things at once: provide examples of how a class can use DY's tools to explore a novel, and to develop a specific reading of The Sound and the Fury as an experimental, Modernist and Freudian work of art. To evaluate that second task, you have to watch the 3 in order. But because each video focuses on a different part of the novel, a different thematic element and different features of DY, you can also view any of them singly.
1. Demo 1 [7:37]
The focus here is on Benjy's section, and how DY's text map and MapIt function helps readers appreciate the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique Faulkner employs to dramatize the presence of "the past."
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-sfdemos.php
2. Demo 2 [8:59]
Here the focus is on Quentin's and Jason's sections, and the particular "past" that matters in this novel - the personal or psychological past - which probably makes The Sound and the Fury Faulkner's most Freudian fiction.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-sfdemos.php
3. Demo 3 [8:52]
This video focuses on the novel's last section, and explores how DY's functions – including Audio clips and Force-Directed graphs – can help students appreciate the novel's engagement with the major Modernist themes of meaning and nothingness, and art and reality.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-sfdemos.php
Using DY to Compare Interpretive Lenses for As I Lay Dying
In the 3 videos below, Erin Penner uses 9 identified DY tools and resources to compare interpretive lenses that we might apply to Faulkner's novel, though all of the techniques she demonstrates can be used for the other Yoknapatawpha fictions as well.
1. Mapping [2:12]
What DY's text map and its accompanying heat map can reveal about the relationship between the Bundrens' journey and their family life at "home."
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-penneraild.php
2. Visualizations and Searches [4:59]
Using both DY's Narrative Analysis tool and the filters on its Location and Event Search pages, this video examines the how the novel develops two kinds of thematic relationships: between present and past, and between character and perception.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-penneraild.php
3. Cultural Context [2:36]
This video looks at how you can use DY's Other Resources – photographs, audio clips, manuscripts – and Commentaries like its "Cemeteries" display to locate the novel in its larger contexts.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-penneraild.php
DY When You Only Know 1 Faulkner Story [7:34]
In this video, Erin Penner uses the example of "Dry September" to demonstrate how even a class that's only reading a single Faulkner text might effectively use the resources of DY. Her focus is on an issue that can confuse modern readers: the indirect way the text references the violent lynching at its (excluded) narrative center. The DY elements she covers include Searching and Keywords.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-pennerds.php
Using DY to Analyze Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! as a Gothic Text [19:18]
In explaining how Faulkner's novel fits into the generic context of Gothic fiction, John Padgett's video also provides an excellent introduction to DY's text maps, as well the Character-Character visualization program and the Events search engine.
DY context: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/family/videos-padgettaa.php
PRESENTATIONS
The first video below has a modest historical value: as DY's inaugural appearance in The Teaching Faulkner Newsletter published annually by the Center for Faulkner Studies, it shows what the project looked like and could do in 2015, when there were 6 novels and 27 short stories in its databases, and many of the digital functions were still on the collaborators' to-do lists.
DY's scholar-editors have presented various aspects of the project dozens of times at various conferences around the world. Thanks to COVID, the remaining two presentations below were delivered remotely, as videos.
Digital Yoknapatawpha in Your Classroom: "A Rose for Emily" [11:24]
This video from 2015 focuses on demonstrating how teachers and students can use the text map for the story to explore both how Faulkner constructs the narrative in time and space, and how his techniques can help them appreciate the story's themes. It ends by looking at how the Other Resources that were available then – Audio Clips and Manuscripts Etc. – can also be brought into the class discussion.
Society for the Study of Southern Literature [8:28]
This video was Railton's virtual presentation as part of DY's panel at the SSSL 2022 Biennial Conference, held in Atlanta in June 2022. It tries to connect to the conference theme, "Technologies of Region," by offering some examples of how DY's technologies can help explore the question of how well the world Faulkner created represents "The South" as a region. It focuses on the Heatmaps, Photographs and Search sections of DY.
Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Symposium [14:33]
This video was Railton's presentation as part of the 2022 DY panel at the annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha conference, University of Mississippi. As indicated in the video, the main focus of the panel was on Digitizing Faulkner, the collection of essays on the project that UVA Press had published the month before. This presentation includes acknowledgment of role F&Y played in development of DY, then looks at 3 elements of DY's digital re-presentation of Faulkner's achievement: Genealogies, Bi-Partite Graphing, Heatmaps.