Digital Collections in Children's Literature: Distance Reading, Scholarship, Community

Children's books are one of the UK's great success stories, yet we severely lag behind other nations when it comes to archiving and granting digital access to this legacy.

This network investigates potential future directions for digital archives of children's books. Uniting experts from one of the largest collections in the world, the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature (Florida, USA), and a growing collection in the UK, Homerton College, Cambridge, scholars and archivists will come together to examine gaps in provision, trends in digital archival scholarship, and future directions in the field. We will conduct a gap-and-trend analysis of existing digital research. Then, over a series of four meetings (two in Cambridge and two in Florida), participants will consider how recent developments in 'distant reading' and digital humanities - using computers to access large bodies of texts - can influence digitisation policies. We are especially mindful of issues of visual media and interactive books, important elements of the reading experience for young children, and how these can be captured digitally not only through library platforms, but also through social media. This work will enhance scholarly uses of such collections and also further enable digital access by the general public. It will result in new digital strategies for both collections, a journal article to publish our findings on distant reading, and a variety of public-focussed impact activities.

This research network has impact as a primary objective, by enhancing the digital uses of children's literature collections in the UK and US. These collections are largely consulted by academic researchers, but their free availability means that parents, teachers, and children have access to them, especially given appropriate platforms.

Improving the accessibility of these platforms, including social media as exhibition space, is one of our main aims. In order to promote wider public use, the project will develop Twitter and Instagram accounts with the hashtag #digiChildLit used to provoke wider discussion on the free availability of historical children's texts. The Twitter account, as well as being a space for debate, will host (mirrored on Instagram) a virtual exhibition of 200 illustrated covers from the Baldwin Library and Homerton College Library. YouTube will be used as a platform for 30 videos that focus on movable books, taking inspiration from Homerton College's initial forays into this area, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSa9u2649nw&feature=youtu.be. YouTube has the benefit of offering sound description for the visually impaired.

We will also encourage teacher involvement in a CPD session at the end of workshop four (Cambridge) for local PGCE students and teachers. The aim of this workshop will be to show teachers working on a specific set text, like Dickens's A Christmas Carol, how to use digital archives to bring the text, including historical changes to wording and illustrations, to life, while teaching children digital research skills.

University-student navigation of these digital collections also has the potential to lead to significant impact. Undergraduate researchers in the fields of literature, education studies, and information science at the University of Florida already make heavy use of Baldwin collections, and such students typically learn digital research skills for applications in non-academic careers. Since ARU has a strong reputation and cohort in children's book illustration, we will encourage MA and PhD illustration student-practitioners to suggest creative ways to use the digital collections, too, by inviting them to participate in the Cambridge workshops. They might, for instance, consider the history of representing rabbits visually for very young children, or research the rendering of streetscapes for historical picturebooks. A special 'drawing from the archives' session will be held on the day after workshop four. ARU's highly successful postgraduates have an important impact upon the UK publishing economy, with their works appearing in the New York Times top 10 picturebooks and the shortlist for the Kate Greenaway Medal. They have won the Macmillan Prize for Children's Picturebook Illustration for the past nine years in a row (2009-18). In 2017, Anglia Ruskin MA graduates won first, second, and third places; in 2018, they won first and third. As children's publishing has not yet been able to embrace the digital turn, with sales of digital materials declining year on year since 2016, a new generation of illustrators who are trained to navigate digital collections could lead to a greater understanding of the creative potential of e-books.