Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Panelist 1: Dr. Hélène Huet (University of Florida) 

In 2016, I published online the digitized French-language notebook of my great-grandfather, Albert Huet, in which he recounts his experience as a young inexperienced soldier in the French army during WWI. For this presentation, I will focus on the origins of the digital project and showcase my most recent endeavor: mapping the locations Albert was sent to during the war and connecting them to the diary’s pages (with accompanying text in both French and English).

Panelist 2: Dr. Lynn Palermo (Susquehanna University)

Dr. Palermo will discuss her own contribution to the digital project. In the summer of 2018, she received a grant to hire two undergraduates to work on translating the diary into English and standardize Albert’s idiosyncratic French. Not only was this project a wonderful learning experience for the students, but it also served to improve the digital project by making it available to a wider audience.

 Panelist 3: Dr. Amanda Shoaf Vincent (Wake Forest University)

Dr. Vincent will discuss how she used Albert’s diary in her class in the fall of 2018. She will explain how she incorporated the diary as one of the primary sources students had to read for an assignment. Her goal with this assignment was to have students grasp how what they were reading in secondary sources played out in terms of lived experience. She used Albert’s diary so students could reflect on how such a source can be used to better their understanding of the past.

All in all, the panel will highlight how a digitized source, in this case the diary of a French soldier relating his WWI experience, can be used for both learning and teaching purposes.

 Please email Dr. Hélène Huet (hhuet@ufl.edu) for the Zoom link