« The Guillemets Project » is an exploratory, digital humanities project focusing on technology and language learning proposed by UVA French Professor, Spyridon Simotas, and myself. In the spirit of a public humanities approach, we explore an emerging body of scholarship that tries to understand the impact of technology on second language pedagogy. « The Guillemets Project » specifically explores how online real-life technology impacts French language learning. One of our primary objectives throughout this project is to emphasize the importance and benefits of learning French, as well as any other world language, and to engage with students through various creative media.
The Power of Languages.
We owe our name « Guillemets » to the French word for quotation marks and its usage as the symbol for dialogue or speech. It is also worth mentioning that the French guillemets are also borrowed in technical diagrammatic representations of a program in software development. It is the case of Unified Modeling Language (UML) where guillemets are used to provide additional contextual information about various aspects of a program. We found that this overlap was a happy coincidence that encompasses both French and Computer Science, and we decided to keep guillemets as the moniker for our project.
What does « Guillemets » mean?
The Process of Designing our Brand.
When creating our website, we thought about the longevity and and sustainability. This led us to use markdown files along with Hugo framework to create theguillemetsproject.com. Markdown is a text-base system that requires minimal coding. We host our website through Github Pages in this repository. If the Hugo theme template ever expires, it is easy to transfer the .md and .html files to another system.
The Value of Markdown.
The Importance of Voices.
We seek to hear from students at UVA and incorporate their experiences in our podcast episodes. We have employed a campaign around Grounds to ask students, “Why are you learning a world language?” Understanding their perspectives helps educators better curate their courses to fit the needs of students. These posters encourage students to directly write on them or visit our website to virtually submit their experience.
Podcasting…
My favorite aspect of this project is our podcast. We have worked hard to create meaningful conversations that explore our niche subject. I edit all our episodes using Reaper, a powerful tool I learned about in my Sound Design course at UVA. We have discovered the importance of audio quality, and are fortunate to utilize UVA resources, such as the Robertson Media Center recording studio. We host our podcast through Anchor.fm which publishes our podcast on various platforms.
