RF

Reading Faulkner
with thinking machines

Digital humanities teaching collection Oxford, Mississippi 2026

Reading Faulkner in the

Age of ThinkingMachines

Four digital experiments use As I Lay Dying to invite students into deep reading—without asking them to use AI to do it.

Begin the journey

The argument behind the experiment

This is a shift in literacy.
Not the end of it.

Young people are not illiterate. They are entangled with technologies that have changed their relationship to reading—and many of our inherited expectations have not changed with them.

01

Explain why reading matters.

Students often struggle less with the mechanics of reading than with understanding why a text matters to their learning. Authority alone is not a rationale.

02

Keep beneficial friction.

Good learning is not frictionless. The task is to preserve the difficulty that produces attention, interpretation, and judgment while removing barriers that merely block access.

03

Design for care, not surveillance.

Detection and monitoring do little to make students want to read. These experiences signal that the teacher cares enough to build an invitation into the work.

“Reading in the era of thinking machines means making intentional choices in how we assign words and reconsidering how students read in digital spaces.”— Marc Watkins

The proposition

A novel is not a container.

It is a weather system
you have to enter.

59

sections shift between fifteen narrators—each voice redrawing the same journey.

The experiments

Choose an instrument

Four ways
through.

Move between modes. Each project treats the interface itself as an argument about how literature might be encountered.

Layered printmaking scene of a reader surrounded by competing silhouettes and a flooded road
SECTION 17DARL

Every voice changes the distance between the reader and the road.

R / 01

Atmosphere as interpretation

Immersive Reader

Enter a reader where image, pace, and spatial sound bend around each narrator. The page becomes a landscape rather than a frame.

Launch immersive readerOpen live project↗
Jewel and his horse in a storm-dark illustrated sequence
PLATE 31 · JEWEL
The Bundren wagon moving beneath circling birds
PLATE 44 · THE ROAD
A tense illustrated domestic scene
PLATE 58 · JEFFERSON

The method

What the interface knows

Attention
is a form
of making.

01

Voice

Who is allowed to organize what we know?

02

Image

What does a picture clarify—and what does it close?

03

Place

How does the route become an argument?

04

Sound

What becomes audible when explanation fails?

Built with AI. Not built for offloading.

The machines built the setting.
The students still do the reading.

There are no embedded chatbots, Faulkner personas, automatic summaries, or buttons that tidy away the novel. Each project is an encapsulated module designed to help students slow down, explore, annotate, and make an interpretive choice.

  • No AI requiredStudents can complete every activity without prompting a model.
  • Local-first workAnnotations remain in the student’s browser until they choose to export them.
  • Disciplinary entry pointsText, image, interface, place, and sound invite writing, art, communication, and coding students into the same novel.

How the project was made

Weeks of making.
Not one prompt.

The finished collection emerged through repeated choices, failures, limits, and revisions—the same kind of productive difficulty it asks students to experience.

  1. 01

    Concept and constraints

    Design an online reading experience that appeals across writing, art, design, and code while resisting easy chatbot offloading.

  2. 02

    Storyboards and style guide

    Use tldraw offline to map all 59 sections, establish recurring characters and motifs, and make the visual language consistent.

  3. 03

    177 generated images

    Create three images for each chapter plate, checking action, continuity, and style against the novel and the storyboard.

  4. 04

    Build, test, revise

    Combine readers, maps, annotation tools, export workflows, images, and activities across multiple coding systems and many iterations.

59section storyboards

177illustrated scenes

Weeksof iteration

Questions the project leaves open

  • How do new technologies complicate and complement our relationships with text and art?
  • Which choices should a human make—and which can be ceded to a machine—in a large-scale creative project?
  • Who is the author, artist, or designer when AI tools participate in the making?

Continue into the classroom

Models for students.
Plans for teachers.

Student resource · 01

Completed Annotation Exemplar

See model annotations for all four experiments, plus a synthesis paragraph and self-check.

View exemplars ↗ Teacher resource · 02

Classroom Guide

Use ready-to-teach analog and digital activities, including mapping and storyboarding with tldraw offline.

Open teaching guide ↗
Archival-style illustrated portrait of William Faulkner W. F. / 1897—1962

Credit · citation · transparency

Made with
machines.
Directed by
a human.

Watkins, Marc. Reading Faulkner in the Age of Thinking Machines. Interactive digital collection, 2026.

AI disclosure. Marc Watkins conceived, directed, selected, revised, and takes responsibility for this gallery and the linked projects. Generative AI systems were used across the collection as creative and technical collaborators for interface prototyping, code generation and debugging, visual or sonic asset development, and editorial scaffolding. This gallery was developed with OpenAI Codex from a design package supplied by Watkins. AI outputs were reviewed and shaped by Watkins; they are not autonomous scholarship or authorship. Model-specific details are documented in project repositories where available.

Literary source: Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1930. This independent educational collection is not an official University of Mississippi publication. Its palette draws on the University’s approved red, navy, powder blue, gray, black, and white color system; no university trademark is used.