Electronic Visualisation of Nineteenth-century French Literary-scientific Texts: Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine

Electronic Visualisation of nineteenth-century French literary-scientific texts is an interactive electronic visualisation tool for the delivery of research-led teaching in nineteenth-century French literature, history and culture. This tool has been implemented via Web 2.0 technologies to allow students to explore the multiple perspectives, themes, contexts and timelines within their core texts. The tool also includes the core text in French and English for comparative, linguistic study. Additional authoring tools enable domain experts to create further interactive visualisations, to develop ontologies, and encourage continued use of these technologies by other interested academic colleagues in related subject domains.

As a pilot project, the tool focused on Flaubert’s most difficult, and hence least taught, interdisciplinary text, La Tentation de Saint Antoine/The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). Using the main ideas of Mary Orr’s Flaubert’s Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science (OUP, 2008), the interactive tool variously facilitates student exploration of Flaubert’s text by presenting its many dialogues of ideas visually, and in various contexts — Flaubert’s fictions, the history of nineteenth-century France — its sciences, ideas, colonial and internal politics, religion etc.– to enhance substantially students’ ability to analyse, comprehend and actively explore the multiple contexts of difficult works.

The tool was implemented using Web 2.0 tagging, allowing the students to explore linkages across the different meanings implicit within the core text (and related texts in other disciplines). Complex visualisations were achieved from simple semantic tagging activities during the authoring phase. The approach developed in this pilot project will hopefully serve as a model for integration of Web-based resources into other Humanities disciplines where simple visualisations of timelines and multiple perspectives can increase students’ understanding of complex, multi-layered texts and contexts. By using appropriate Web 2.0 technology the intention is to make authoring of these visualisations accessible to domain experts with minimal requirements for specialist computer expertise.

People

• Professor Mary Orr
• Dr Mark Weal