How the project was constructed?
This project was carried out as part of the Rare Book and Digital Humanities master’s programme at the University of Besançon Franche-Comté. The first step in this research was to gather enough documents on the subject. The second step consisted of problematising and writing the research paper and the last step was to realise an interactive website full of resources for people to navigate through and learn interactively.
What does this website want to achieve?
This project aims to shed light on a topic that still today lacks in terms of research. It wishes to address a large public on the history of cecity in 19th century France and on a system that revolutionised the life of the blind and visually impaired. This website, contrary to the dissertation that has been written, will cover the subject of the blind before the 19th century, and a small part will be dedicated to the blind nowadays.
The aim of this website is to share academic resources for researchers, but it was also designed for people who are curious to learn about it. It wishes to deconstruct the misconceptions invented around Louis Braille by acknowledging all the long wrongs that has been done.
Where did I find my source?
L’institut des Jeunes Aveugles
Musée Louis Braille
Musée Valentin Hauy
Archives Hôpital des Quinzes-Vingts
How long this project took ?
This project was conceived during my time volunteering at the Groupement des Intellectuels Aveugles Ou Amblyopes (GIAA). As digitalisation volunteer, I was in charge of digitizing books so that it can be later adapted to the use of blind or visually impaired students. I was glad to give my time to an organisation that would facilitate the access to culture to a larger and excluded group of people. Therefore, I dedicated my two years of master to pursue my interest on the topic. During this master I had several occasion to think of the multiple benefit of working on creating digital library and one of the most important argument was to give access to culture and free education, anyone whose’s able to have access to a computer and internet can consult almost any written work written thanks to the many digitalisation project occuring all over the world. But as it will be explained later, giving access to the written world to a group of visual deficient is different and always have been.
How to navigate through this website?
This website is easily to navigate through. It presents a traditional home page inviting the visitor to reflect on the use of each human senses. The other pages offers more bibliographical and historical information implicated in the evolution of the condition of blind indiciduals.
Institutes
If you, yourself are interested in taking action to facilitate the access to education to young blind you can volunteer at the GIAA who are actively looking for new volunteer.