In recent decades, we've seen a proliferation of digital resources -- databases and digitized texts and documents -- that help us to better understand the history of France and the Francophone world. This has been an enormous benefit to students and teachers, and transforms the work we can do in French and in the Humanities:
- We can now study well-known works in their original editions rather than contemporary re-editions that often substantially change and modernize the works.
- We can discover new works that have never been republished and aren't available in modern editions.
- We can explore archival documents that would have been impossible to study from classrooms in Seattle.
- And we can analyze broad trends using search engines, databases and catalogues to spot patterns that are only visible at scale.
Of course, these new resources come with challenges:
- how to locate them on the web
- how to assess their quality and reliability
- and how to use them, as primary sources and data
Above all, there are the dangers of illusions of completeness: what secrets do these archives continue to withhold from us? what is missing from them? what has not been digitized? and why?
In French 379, we’ll explore a number of episodes from the history of France and the Francophone world through digital archives that give us new access and perspectives on them. We'll emphasize the 16th-18th centuries, from the Religious Wars through the age of Louis XIV, through the 18th century and up to the French Revolution.
We will see what these archives can tell us, and learn how to use them. Students’ main project for the course will be the development of their own digital archive, foregrounding an aspect of French history – a collection, an episode, an event or development – using one of a variety of digital platforms which we will look at.
No background in anything digital or computational is expected, but students should be prepared to do some technical work: we’ll be working with various data formats and techniques for analyzing them (we’ll introduce this gently with no expectations of previous experience, but students should be interested in learning!).
Some background in French will be important. The class will be conducted in English but we’ll be working with French language archives.