Adapting English-language Pedagogy to Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities in France : Results from using the IIIF Online Training Workshop with Future Cultural Heritage Engineers, Librarians, and Archivists

The preservation of cultural heritage is one of the fundamental missions of the Ecole nationale des chartes in Paris, which recently celebrated its bicentennial. For close to fifteen years, the Ecole has also proposed a Masters entitled Technologies numériques appliquées à l’histoire (TNAH), or Digital Technologies Applied to History. This program trains future archivists, librarians, and research engineers in a common program that focuses on the technical aspects of the preservation and valorization of cultural heritage. Despite this common program, or perhaps because of it, graduates find careers all across this spectrum. It is thus a challenge to find subject matters that are transversal to all these potential interests. For two years, as chargé de cours (lecturer) for the English-language portion of the curriculum, I have chosen to use the IIIF Online Training Workshop (https://training.iiif.io/iiif-online-workshop/index.html). This training workshop takes students through the process and logic of the IIIF standard, from understanding its uses, to manipulating the image API, and finally to creating and hosting one’s own annotations. It finishes with a project, chosen by students, where they upload, manipulate, and annotate their own images, which they then present to their peers as a “proof of concept” for a theoretical IIIF project at their imagined institution. As a whole, this IIIF assignment permits not only an assessment of reading and spoken comprehension, but also oral and written communication, alongside a technical standard that is increasingly more in demand. 

This workshop, originally developed by Glen Robson (IIIF Technical Coordinator) and adapted to the needs of the TNAH program, has multiple benefits for the students. Above all, it demonstrates a real use-case in using English language – attending a training seminar – in the course of one’s professional life, which corresponds to the vocation of the TNAH Masters to prepare its students for their future careers. It also applies broadly to all future career choices of the students, being just as relevant to an archivist as a research engineer in a humanities lab. As well, it gives real, practical experience with APIs – so that students understand intimately how this fundamental technology works. Finally, by allowing students to pick their own subject for the final project, it allows students to embrace their own interests and creativity. The course is pedagogically sound, as it confronts students not just with reading and spoken comprehension, but also written and oral composition with the final project and the presentation to the class. Student engagement is even further increased by leaving them the choice of the subject matter for their final project. The IIIF Online Training Workshop is thus a powerful tool for English-language pedagogy in digital humanities and the preservation of cultural heritage.