An Annotated Bibliography
Focalization in Children’s Picture Books
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Yannicopoulou, Angela. “Focalization in Children’s Picture Books: Who Sees in Words and Pictures.” Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature. Ed. Michael Cadden. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 2010. Web.
Referrer: Carrie Hintz
Categories: children’s literature, picturebooks, focalization, perspective
Annotation:
This article discusses the importance and implications of our predominantly visual culture on children’s literature. Yannicopoulou outlines the differences between different types of focalization starting with nonfocalization where the main point of focus is the characters, moving to internal focalization where the narrator is seeing the story through his or her own eyes, onto fixed internal focalization where the story is given to the reader through the restricted view of a single character. Moving beyond these, variable internal focalization, multiple internal focalization, external focalization, and discrepant modes of focalization are discussed in depth. In doing this kind of defining of focal points and perspectives, Yannicopoulou considers the assumptions that must be made from an ideology standpoint for those reading picture and nonpicture books. The role of pictures for each of the aforementioned forms of focalization is varied, but overall facilitates a type of assumptive understanding of sociological, cultural, and even historical focalization of the text, it’s characters, and it’s world. The narrative text works in conjunction with the images in order push forth verbal and visual story information.
Chaperoning Words
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Sanders, Joe Sutliff. “Chaperoning Words: Meaning-Making in Comics and Picture Books.” Children’s Literature: 57-90. Web.
Referrer: Chris Vitale
Categories: picturebooks, comics, visual storytelling, methodology, image/text
Annotation:
Sanders is making the argument that comic book study and picture book study are intertwined. In this lengthy paper, we are introduced to a methodology for determining the difference and meaning between the messages and forms of these two genres. Theory is a difficult thing to apply to comics and picturebooks according to Sanders. Instead he proposes the notation of the obvious differences among the two forms in order find a solution to his defined problem. Sanders states, “if they have even the dimmest awareness of the impact of shape, line, color, and pacing (and I suspect they have quite a cunning awareness of a wide range of aesthetics), they are chaperoning key elements themselves.” Sanders section entitled “Fixing Meaning” is particularly important for it’s treatement of the word and image dynamic in these forms of literature. The two genres combine words in a fundamentally similar way. The major takeaway is as follows: “in general, if the book anticipates a solitary reader who chaperones the words as they go about their work of fixing the meaning of the images, that book is a comic; if the book instead anticipates a reader who chaperones the words as they are communicated to a listening reader, that book is a picture book.”
Graphs, Maps, Trees
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Paperback ed. London: Verso, 2007. Print.
Referrer: Matt Gold
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data visualization, historiography, methodology
Annotation:
This essential piece of the Digital Humanities canon outlines the efforts of Franco Moretti and his team in their journey to distant read the literary work produced over a few centuries. Graphs, maps and trees are shown to be valuable tools for literary scholars, like their natural and social sciences counterparts. The concept of distant reading, application of an analytics and quantification driven approach to reading wide ranges of texts was groundbreaking for the literary community. This historiography of the literary canon illustrates the merit and value of distant reading as a legitimate methodology. Acting as a roadmap for how quantification and visualization can augment, complement, and completely topple traditional research methodologies, this text is a fundamental piece of this Picturebooks project.
Computational historiography
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Mimno, David. “Computational historiography: Data mining in a century of classics journals” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) 5(1), 2012
Referrer: Scott Dexter
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data mining, computer science, methodology
Annotation:
David Mimno follows in Franco Moretti’s footsteps in an effort to data mine a massive archive of classics jorunals. This distant reading is the preferred methodology for Mimno who has identified the ability close read such a wide array of documents as unrealistic. The paper discusses the use of computational tools that allow for the statistical analysis of the corpus. The work is explicitly complimentary to traditional scholarship. The collection that Mimno is working with has been OCR-ed from over twenty classical philology and archaeology journals. Outlining the tools used in statistically driven mining of texts, Mimno discusses tokenization, removal of stopwords, word distance and divergence, and topic modeling. The algorithmic representations of these computational methods are given as well as an introductory discussion of the ways they work and are used. Finally, Mimno presents his findings in the forms of graphics, topic models, and observations.
Significant Themes in 19th-Century Literature
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Jockers, Matthew and David Mimno, “Significant Themes in 19th-Century Literature” Poetics 41(6):750–769, 2013
Referrer: Scott Dexter
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data mining, computer science, methodology
Annotation:
Matthew Jockers and David Mimno discuss their distant reading project regarding the themes of 19th century literature. To do so, the two researchers mine and model topics from over 3,300 works of literature. The literature encompasses British, American, and Irish texts. Taking a variety of other factors into consideration the two seek to find trends in the themes of novels from that century. The methodology used incorporates counting words, tokenization as well as topic modeling. The tool Mallet is used by the researchers as the main engine for mining the text. Jockers and Mimno discuss the preprocessing elements (stopword removal, Bag of Words segmenting of the text, part of speech tagging of nouns, and modeling of the topics). Finally, the analysis and observations are given. Topic modeling is shown to be a scalable solution for those interested in reading massive selections of hundreds and thousands of books.
The Digital Humanities Unveiled
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Spratt, Emily L. “The Digital Humanities Unveiled: Perceptions Held by Art Historians and Computer Scientists about Computer Vision Technology” (Self Published).
Referrer: Scott Dexter
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data mining, computer vision, art, art history, computer science, methodology
Annotation:
This paper outlines a survey completed by both art historians and computer scientists in relation to a computers ability to interpret aesthetic and beauty. The value of this work lies in the responses of this survey. Computer vision is rapidly becoming a more accepted and accessible method of examining art. For art historians and computer scientists, the implications are obvious. This digital humanities project used, “twenty-one questions for art historians and sixteen for computer scientists that were intended to shed light on field members’ knowledge of the capabilities and applications of computer vision technology, attitudes and perceptions about the use of it, and reactions to the meaning of this type of digitization in the humanities.” Spratt discusses the positive and negative reactions to computer vision’s ability to detect and automatically recognize aesthetic experiences of beauty. Channeling philosophy, Spratt defines what these variables mean for her survey.
Toward Automated Discovery of Artistic Influence
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Saleh, Babak, Kanako Abe, Ravneet Singh Arora, and Ahmed Elgammal. “Toward Automated Discovery of Artistic Influence.” Multimed Tools Appl Multimedia Tools and Applications (2014). Web.
Referrer: Scott Dexter
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data mining, computer vision, art, art history, computer science
Annotation:
A team from the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers experimented with art and computer vision in 2014. Using advanced computer driven recognition of images, the team was able to explore the influence of other artists on particular pieces of art. The study was focused on two types of computational inquiry: “discriminative vs. generative models” as well as feature extraction and comparison. The importance of this work is the argument that computers have a, to a certain degree, level of ability in recognizing the influence of other artists in multiple works of art. The work of a Art Historian is arguably completed by an automated process that involves computer vision and classification. The high level computer algorithms are paired with art history style analysis of the paintings similarity to compare the traditional and novel methodologies. This paper is a valuable source of tools and methods for computer vision in illustrations.
Radical Change Theory and Synergistic Reading for Digital Age Youth
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Dresang, Eliza T., and Bowie Kotrla. ‘‘Radical Change Theory and Synergistic Reading for Digital Age Youth.’’ The Journal of Aesthetic Education 43 (2009): 92-107.
Referrer: Chris Vitale
Categories: radical change theory, picturebooks, Black and White, visual story telling, digital picturebooks
Annotation:
Dresang and Kotrla begin by discussing radical change theory in relation to the award-winning extended length picture book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Dresang notes that this text is an indication of the changing nature of books in response to “digital age youth.” The changing reader is one that is now concerned with interactivity, connectivity, and access. Radical Change Theory dictates that books must becomes more sophisticated in order to keep up with the demand of it’s changing audience. An important part of this article is the discussion of “Changing Children.” The preconceptions we have about children and childhood are rapidly changing into more complex and ambiguously defined identifications. By acknowledging Radical Change Theory, we can more accurately assess books created in the digital age or for the generation of people consuming this type of media. Aesthetic experiences must be responsive to what the youth demands.
Visual Narrativity in the Picture Book
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Wesseling, Elisabeth. “Visual Narrativity in the Picture Book: Heinrich Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter.” Children’s Literature in Education 35.4 (Dec. 2004): 319–45.
Referrer: Carrie Hintz
Categories: visual story telling, picturebooks, color theory, image/text, irony, layout
Annotation:
Wesseling immediately argues, “Both words and images make their own relatively autonomous contribution to the overall semantic, aesthetic and emotional effect of the picture book. Therefore, it has often been observed that the picture book is closer to other mixed narrative forms such as drama or film than to verbal fiction.” Channeling Nodelman, Wesseling dives into a reading of Der Struwwelpeter, oder lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder that is focused on word and image interaction. This close reading of the text and images garners observations regarding the representations, visual storytelling, and textual augmentation of the illustrations. The construction and layout of pages in relation to rhyming is discussed and categorized as Visual Rhymes. This abstract perspective on visual structure is valuable for thinking about the implications of layout in distant reading picturebooks.
Emerging Literacy of (An)Other Kind
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Stewart, Michelle Pagni. “Emerging Literacy of (An)Other Kind: Speakerly Children’s Picture Books.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 28.1 (Spring 2003): 42–51.
Referrer: Carrie Hintz
Categories: picturebooks, oral books, layout
Annotation:
Stewart stakes the claim that picturebooks function in a similar way to oral works. Most interesting, this article discusses the “Oral Performance of Illustrations.” Stewart notes that the visual construction of the page works toward creating a more oral experience for the text. This is done by using illustrations that are not exactly connected to the text of the story or the words on the page. The ambiguity of the pictures gives agency to the child to determine what is being seen. The story is made more interactive and ambiguous, similar to an oral text. Picturebooks for Stewart are by definition the polar opposite of an oral text, but have an element of orality in their execution and the experience that the audience encounters. A text that is speakerly is not necessarily oral.
