French Urban Space helps you read and study the Paris novels of the nineteenth century. Its key aims are to improve your reading strategies for French literature. The activities show you how to generate essay questions, develop arguments and create your own original material for writing papers. You can work through the whole package over a semester whilst reading the French novels of the nineteenth century, guided by your lecturer. You can also dip into any of the options from the menu on the left and explore the activities. The Course Executive, below, gives you a quick overview of the aims of each section and lists the outcomes you can expect from your study of each component.

Running through French Urban Space are two themes for approaching French Studies in the twenty-first century:

- the theme from Area Studies for approaching the city in literature, where the novel or poetry illuminate social, political and economic aspects of urban study, and,

- the use of emerging technologies on the web and from digital philology to provide powerful text-processing tools to unlock and quarry electronic texts.

These online materials are a set of resources that encourage undergraduates to engage with area studies through French language and through French literary studies. The materials developed do not simply use web technologies to add interactivity to the learning objects (LOs) but also equip humanities students with an introductory understanding of the emerging technologies of mark-up for handling digital texts in the Web 2.0 era of The Semantic Web.

One of the aspects of the resource is to use formatting or spatial layout to uncover information in the text. Please adjust the size of the browser window if the lines are too long for comfortable reading or the size of the text (with Control + and Control -). The text is also easier to select, copy and paste since it contains minimal formatting. If you do quote from these materials please cite the original author, composer or photographer.

The materials were developed in 2007 under a project for the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (LLAS). The materials rely on a fairly complete implementation of the Document Object Model (The Browser DOM) and in 2008 the Mozilla Firefox web browser offered this implementation. If you experience a lack of functionality in the resources, please update to the most recent version of Mozilla Firefox (please see reference below in bibliography).

The course executive provides a way into the resources, giving you a plan for using the materials. It offers some step-by-step ways of using sections and also a set of experiments to try, since two key sections of the resource are interactive and will change depending on the selections of users during each session. Finally, OUTCOMES are offered as working practices which you can take away from the exercise for application in your own study or research.

• First, please try the exercise on Lefebvre & Paris. This first exercise has 2 aims: (a) to give you opportunities to interrogate a very short text and through that to see how hypertext links can offer context-sensitive help to your reading. And (b) to introduce you to a method for reading longer texts in French, such as novels, this self-sudy method is called LOUPS.
  OUTCOMES: (i) Copy and keep a 'Vocabulary List' from your LOUPS of the extract. (ii) Try the LOUPS strategy on a novel you are currently studying.


• The SIFT exercise explains and lets you experiment with the Document Object Model of a web-page. The aim here is to give you experience of how a text on a web-page can be re-displayed by changing the settings of the document's style-sheets. This is the basis for tagging texts with a mark-up language for later queries and experimentation. SIFT XML to CSS The XML language is a building block for The Semantic Web, a way of using web pages to associate meaning with text. Attributing meaning to text plays a key part of language learning and in the study of fiction and poetry. Working with text tagging, then, can be very fruitful for those studying literature.
  OUTCOMES: (i) A knowledge of the structure of xml elements and tags. (ii) practical visualisation of changing attributes and how attribute values permit extraction of specific notes from linguistic or literary corpora. (iii) opportunity to tag own example textual data and see immediate results, thus building appreciation of tagging in note-making.


• Chemins du savoir is an environment for generating essay ideas. The theme and period of study is Paris in the nineteenth century. Many degree programmes in the UK use the novels from this period in studies of French culture and out of this corpus researchers have begun to develop approaches to urban studies or the space of the city in literature. See particularly Ross, Wilson and Harvey from our Bibliography below. The interactive web-page Chemins du savoir is for use after attending lectures or during the reading of the cited novels as a way of generating essay notes based on a theme.
  Example Exercise: Use the keyword 'Modernity' to search through the 120 'textemes', you will then have to follow-up the highlighting process of SIFT with Control F, to find each entry. Read each texteme to see which novel or novels and which secondary source materials discuss this theme.
  OUTCOMES: (i) a set of electronic notes from the brain-storming session on nineteenth century French literature. (ii) a model to follow when taking own notes and developing notes into re-usable resources. These form the basis for synthesis and argument-making in longer essays and research papers.



• The Zola text and SIFT is an opportunity to use the SIFT tool on the full text of a French novel, Émile Zola's L'Assommoir (The Grog Shop), published in Paris in 1877. The first exercise is to use SIFT for what it was originally designed, to reveal patterns or strata in a large corpus. The names of the novel's characters are perfect for this. First, use the CORPUS TEXT setting to reduce the font size to only 0.5mm. Then scroll through the novel to gain an impression of its distribution and extent. Then scroll back to the top and choose the main character, Gervaise, from the PROPER NAMES drop-down. Click the start button and her name will be re-rendered in blue and a font size of 5mm. If you have a scroll-wheel on your mouse (see image here) use it to let the novel 'play' or scroll down automatically on its own. You will have a visual unfolding of the patterns of where Gervaise appears through the narrative. A next step is to add a second character, say, Lantier, the scroll through will let you form a hypothesis about the (a) the periods in the novel where Lantier figures, (b) his importance, and (c) his relationship with Gervaise. Try this now Zola text and SIFT

  A second exercise in sifting through the novel is to render a theme in larger, coloured characters so you can see it and mine it from the corpus. One such theme could be space or distance in the city. Use these spatial keywords one by one in the SEARCH STRING box: mètres lieues (the league, an old measure of distance) quartier and then scroll to see where clusters of all these keywords occur close together. You may copy and paste the text into a Notepad or Word document to show the text in normal size again. OUTCOMES: (i) an overview of the patterns and characters in the novel, L'Assommoir, (ii) a working method for sifting through a longer text for themes, with a worked example on space. The worked example is where Zola uses the work of a Paris goldsmith to make a political point.



• The Le Spleen de Paris section of these resources offers a selection of verse from Baudelaire's collection. Use it to search for themes in these poems and to familiarise yourself with the key poems before exploring the final, image sections of these LLAS resources. One experiment to try is searching for 'vous' to see which poem addresses the reader. Use this section, too, to become familiar with typing-in French accented characters with your keyboard. A list of accents is given near the top of the section for you to copy and refer to.
  OUTCOMES: (i) a familiarity with the texts of Baudelaire's verse on the city of Paris, (ii) practice with typing-in accented characters, and a re-useable list to paste into other notes and documents.




• The final two sections: Poet as Rag-Picker and Working with Images introduce photographic images as cultural artefacts to study alongside the literary texts. The poetry from the previous section, Le Spleen de Paris opens up the themes which these last two sections illustrate. The literature student is often unfamiliar with visual resources so these final two components provide basic introductory practice in engaging with non-textual resources. In Poet as Rag-Picker images of twenty-first century Paris are juxtaposed alongside secondary sources. The aim here is to see the relevance of reading critical material to prepare for contemporary study of the urban space.
  Finally, the learner is ready to move onto to Working with Images. Continuity is provided into this section by means of the Baudelaire reference, then the learner is invited to view three media sequences and respond to a question and an activity exercise on contemporary urban space. The exercise may be handed-out as a practical activity and so the Brief and Marking Scheme are provided here for you to download and re-use. The documents use WORD and EXCEL.
  
  brief.doc      scheme.xls

Microsoft Developer Center offers an introduction to Cascading Style Sheets along with a very useful reference manual (please use MS Internet Explorer to access this for best results) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531205.aspx

Free download Mozilla Firefox with required DOM implementation. SIFT is best browsed on a PC with Mozilla Firefox, or on a Mac with Safari. Mozilla Firefox needs to be re-set to prevent it timing-out.


Download CD Cover for Learning Pack as large PhotoShop file (7.5Mb). Back cover has space to add your own instructions, cdcover.psd

Download the A4 Poster as very large PhotoShop file (17Mb). Amend to provide url to your own installation of French Urban Space poster.psd See example PDF of A4 Poster before you download poster.pdf

In May 2008 Detailed User Guidelines for Teachers were made available for free download as a WORD document. You may save, edit and re-use this document teach.doc to support your delivery of these materials.