The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Steve is the engine behind Digital Yoknapatawpha. But, despite his love of Faulkner, Steve never made himself "sole owner and proprietor" of this digital project or any other. He led by example, putting in long hours for many years, but shared the goods with one and all. Steve created an inviting, communal approach to literary study that I haven't seen before or since. Most important, however, is the way he connected Faulkner readers and scholars; Steve was unabashedly enthusiastic about Faulkner's works, and allowed the rest of us to be, too.

- Erin Penner

Steve was a mentor, a critical thinker, and a collaborator. He knew how to get the best of me, challenging me at every turn and being satisfied only when he knew it was my best work. I remember working on The Unvanquished, one of my first DY assignments. I was convinced of the pattern of Bayard and Ringo’s movements when they are chasing Grumby. Steve was relentless in his questioning and critiquing my interpretation. When that project ended, I knew The Unvanquished in a completely different way because of Steve’s tenacious editing that was often teaching in action. In the DY world, he was the undisputed leader. He will be greatly missed.

- Jennie Joiner

I first contacted Steve back in 2013 about getting involved with the Digital Yoknapatawpha project. Steve’s enthusiasm and warmth immediately came across from our exchanges over email, and he gave me the confidence to try my hand at digital humanities work and the complexities of Faulknerian data entry. He taught me a lot about how to be a good collaborator.

After all the work in the digital sphere, I finally met Steve in person at the DY project meetings he organized in Charlottesville in the summers of 2018 and 2019. Again, he was incredibly welcoming and had brought researchers from all over the world together. Those meetings were both fun (it was my first time trying a bacon doughnut!) and productive. Steve created a real sense of teamwork and friendship around the project. His encouragement led me to pursue my own digital humanities project in a different research area, which I could never have done without his mentorship. He was a great example of how academia should be: generous with his knowledge, committed to helping others, and dedicated to connecting diverse groups of people through his work.

- Ben Robbins

Some things only take on meaning in hindsight. This was not the case when I met Steven Railton in the summer of 2013. That year, I had received a Harrison Fellowship to do research on Faulkner. At that time, I was in the first few years of my profession. I had taken a faculty position at a university in Taiwan – and thus every opportunity to work in a library well-provisioned in my field could be weighed in proverbial gold. That first day, in the later afternoon, descending into the Special Collections at UVa, I submitted my first request. The librarian considered the slip of paper and looked up at me. If I were quick enough, she encouraged, I might be able to catch a Dr. Railton in the lobby. He was the one to talk to about Faulkner, she concluded with a wink. I have been known to be stubborn, even willfully resistant to good advice, but one thing I know: never ignore a librarian, especially one who will adjudicate your access to a special collection. So, I dutifully did as she suggested and found Steve as he was about to leave the library. One thing I noticed at once. There were no ceremonies with him. He smiled warmly, told me that being an early riser, he’d had a long day and would love to meet me for lunch the following day.

In the café of the main library, we met again – and he asked me about myself, my research, my experience, and proceeded to tell me about his new project, inquiring if I would be interested in attending a meeting later that week. I was a little taken aback, I must admit, when I strolled into the meeting room to find dozens of scholars and IT specialists. Steve had spoken with me in the most friendly and casual of manners that I hadn’t gleaned the true extent of the massive undertaking that was and would become Digital Yoknapatawpha. This was Steve’s way: a rare ability to find people where they are and to include them in a far bigger communal endeavor. I knew then, in that meeting room, that I had stumbled onto a very special project. What I have come to appreciate more – especially with Steve’s passing – is how rare it is that he would give his time to me initially in the way he did. He was recruiting for his project, but Steve had more help than he needed. What truly remains in my memory is sitting across from him in that café: I was a young scholar, still green and a little trepidatious, and he was a generous man entirely free of any of the airs that one typically finds with accomplished professors in our profession, a man genuinely interested in the interpersonal contact between us regardless of the outcome. Thank you, Steve. I will miss you.

- John Corrigan

IATH’s Fellows Program gives us, the IATH staff, the opportunity to work with a broad spectrum of types of faculty. One of Steve’s characteristics appreciated by all the IATH staff over the course of our involvement in two of Steve’s digital projects (both now major online resources) was his personal investment in sweat equity - Steve was unmatched in the level of effort he committed himself to on each project.

For Digital Yoknapatawpha, a substantial amount of his effort was expended (through to the end of his life) in creating and maintaining a social structure that cultivated an inclusive and effective collaboration among a community of Faulkner scholars and teachers. The community was deeply involved in the intellectual design and the evolution of that design for Digital Yoknapatawpha. However, most importantly, each member of the community invested substantial effort in the numerous facets of interpretation required to create informative interactions to illuminate the characters, locations and events in Faulkner’s narratives. Steve understood how crucial the teamwork across the evolving community was to the success of Digital Yoknapatawpha. It was Steve’s effective shepherding that assured the collaboration’s success.

Steve was also dedicated to the success of individuals, particularly young scholars, welcoming them to the community and providing a supportive environment for academic development.

- IATH staff

Steve and I met in 1982 when I enrolled in his course on Cooper, Melville, and Twain at the University of Virginia. I was new to the PhD program there and had very little experience with nineteenth-century American literature and no real intention of gaining much more of it, but Steve’s class was a real joy to attend. The workload was heavy and the assignments imaginative and varied: we had to lead a seminar session, for example. During mine, Steve didn’t react to anything I said or asked the class to consider, but afterward, he told me, “You are a natural teacher.” Steve reiterated that confidence when he asked me to serve as a grader in three sections of his post-1850 American literature course. He remains the single best lecturer to undergraduates that I have ever seen. He combined scholarship with showmanship, wearing a white suit to lecture on Twain and eating an ice cream cone for Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” Steve’s validation of my own teaching plays in my head to this day, not as congratulations but as motivation; I want to be the teacher he thought I was. He was just as encouraging of my scholarly work. Even though his own commitments wouldn’t allow him to serve on my dissertation committee, he read my first two chapters and wrote extensive comments and questions in the margins, which no other professor at any of the three universities I attended ever did. After my graduation our paths crossed occasionally at conferences, and Steve was always his welcoming and congenial self, but when he asked me in 2013 to serve as an associate director of his new Digital Yoknapatawpha website I was shocked that he remembered I was a Faulkner scholar at all, never mind that he thought well enough of my work to ask me to collaborate on such a groundbreaking—and such a large—new project. His request reminded me that none of us will learn if we don’t try to do something we don’t know how to do. Teacher, scholar, mentor, colleague, friend: I miss him.

- Theresa Towner

True to Faulkner, my first meeting with Steve at MLA 2012 in Seattle seemed only incidental at first. Little did I know that from that day forward I would enter Yoknapatawpha and never leave it. I could not have asked for a better guide than Steve. He was kind, supportive, and modeled how to be a good scholar, colleague, and person. With Digital Yoknapatawpha he was inexhaustible — every essay, every visualization, and probably every single one of the nearly 16,000 records in the database was at some point created or curated by him.

I feel lucky that I have been able to be part of DY because of him, luckier that he took the time to mentor me on teaching, research, and even, sometimes, parenting, but I feel luckiest of all to have called him a friend.

- Johannes Burgers

I first met Steve Railton where I’ve met so many of my friends in Faulkner, at the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference. A group of us were carpooling to the picnic at Rowan Oak, and we offered him a ride. On the short trip to Faulkner’s home, Steve outlined the project that would become Digital Yoknapatawpha, a virtual “home” for Faulkner’s fictional county. Over the course of the next ten years, Steve created another home for those of us working on the project. I was one of a group of scholars who learned how to input data into the project’s database because, as Steve said, it was easier to teach us how to do that than to teach the computer techs about Faulkner. Inevitably, though, we all learned from one another. I learned more about the digital humanities from Steve and the IATH team at the University of Virginia, and they gained insight into Faulkner. Even though I am from Mississippi, I learned so much about my state from reading Faulkner. I joined the project because I wanted to help people learn about Faulkner’s (and my) Mississippi, to read and understand and love the fiction like I did. I’m so grateful to Steve for all that he taught me and others through his work, and I know that’s how he would want to be remembered. A quick keyword search of DY shows a variety of unsavory classroom teachers, from Addie Bundren to Labove and others. Faulkner’s best teachers often school their pupils outside of the classroom; Sam Fathers and Lucas Beauchamp, for example, teach their most important lessons to their “students” in the woods of Yoknapatawpha. Steve Railton taught his in Faulkner’s digital world, and we are all the better for it.

- Lorie Watkins Massey