# From the Claude Code Workshops to the Classroom: Claire-Marie Brisson Launches Le Sillage October 20, 2026 ![Claire-Marie Brisson sitting at a table talking into a mic in the learning lab](/sites/g/files/omnuum6756/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2026-10/Claire-Marie_Brisson_20260708.png?itok=SyF8hTKB) Faculty who attended the Bok Center’s summer workshop series “Claude for Teaching, Course Development, and Research” have begun building tools for their own courses. This fall, students in French 64 are doing their coursework inside one of them: an online research tool that would ordinarily fall to a university IT team or an outside vendor. [Claire-Marie Brisson](https://rll.fas.harvard.edu/people/claire-marie-brisson), Preceptor in French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, has launched [Le Sillage](https://lesillage.app), a website in French and English where students read, transcribe, and map the written record of French North America, from Jacques Cartier's 1545 *Brief récit* to the Franco-American press of the twentieth century. She designed and built the site in Claude Code. In a note to the Bok Center team, she credited the workshops with shaping both the site’s pedagogical design and her sense of what a digital tool can do in a language classroom. The site, she notes, costs about the price of a latte per month to run. ![Sillage Website](/sites/g/files/omnuum6756/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-10/Sillage_Claire_Marie_Brisson_0.png?itok=LYtFCci5) Brisson, who teaches intermediate and advanced French, came to the summer workshops without a clear picture of what she was signing up for: "I just know that I enjoy technology, and I wanted to learn a little bit more." The series uses recipe metaphors for conceptualizing work with Claude: take stock of the ingredients you have, articulate the steps that would turn them into what you want to serve, prepare and present. Brisson, who has a background in food and wine, took the metaphor literally. The first tools she built were a clickable aroma wheel for an in-class smelling lab where students explore *terroir* (the idea that a wine carries the character of the land it comes from) and "Podcast Zéro," a scaffolded studio that walks students from "I have an idea" to "I'm ready to record" in French. "What changed for me was realizing the operation didn't have to be a one-off prompt. It could become a reusable skill," she said on a visit to the Learning Lab after the series. "That's the moment it stopped feeling like a single recipe and started feeling like a little kitchen." "What changed for me was realizing the operation didn't have to be a one-off prompt. It could become a reusable skill," -Claire-Marie Brisson The written record of French North America is scattered across dozens of libraries, and students in a language course rarely get to work with it; just finding it can take most of a semester. Brisson wanted one place where they could open actual documents, read them in the French in which they were written, and do real research with these materials. Le Sillage is that place: an independent project of her own, growing out of research she has pursued since her dissertation. Her fifteen French 64 students transcribe pages of manuscripts, early printed books, and maps, using images called up live from the libraries that hold them, from Harvard's Houghton Library to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. As they work, students tag the places, people, and uncertain readings they find, and each tagged place appears on an interactive map of the continent, overlaid with the Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties documented by Native Land Digital. In one exercise, students compare Paul Le Jeune's 1634 *Relation* in manuscript and in print and find that an Innu song changes between the two: "Kaie nir Khigatoatoarint" in the handwriting becomes "Kaie, nir, khigatoutaouim" in type. As Brisson puts it, "you can watch a French printer edit an Indigenous language." Students write their essays on the site as well. It includes Brisson's actual French 64 essay assignments, and for each source the students consult, they fill out a note card on what role it plays in their argument and whether it supports or complicates their thesis. While they draft, the site surfaces the relevant cards, so a passage from a manuscript a student transcribed themselves can go into an essay with its citation already attached. "My students are working with the same pages a historian would, in the French they were written in, and then writing about what they found," Brisson says. Brisson's project reflects what the workshop series is designed to do: give faculty enough technical fluency to build tools shaped by their own pedagogical commitments rather than a vendor's defaults. As Brisson put it: "I think that’s what surprised me most about the experience. I didn’t have to learn to write the code, but I did have to learn how to think through the architecture of the project with the coding, articulate what I wanted precisely, and evaluate outputs. In some ways, the process resembled the work I already do when designing a course: start with the intellectual objectives, build the activities around them, see what works, and revise. The difference was that I was now able to translate those decisions into a functioning digital environment.” See also:- [ AI-Powered Learning Tools ](/news-items/ai-powered-learning-tools) - [ Harvard News ](/news-items/harvard-news) - [ Bok News ](/news-items/bok-news) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)