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Quantifying Bias: Tracing Children’s Literature’s Canonization Through Data Mining of Historical Book Lists [SLIDE 1] Opening Slide with titleHello and thank you for that introduction![Slide 2] Obligatory Cat GifThose of you who know me know that lists are my scholarly catnip. I've done a good bit of work looking at best seller lists and prize winning books lists and I enjoy lists and listmakers as objects of study. [Slide 3] Goals for Today’s PresentationToday’s talk is about one list in particular that has inspired my current work, the pamphlet “Books for the Young” by Caroline Hewins. My goals for today are:Present the highpoints of Hewin’s list, including its key position at the start of children’s literature as a fielddiscuss my analysis and observations about this list, based on both close reading and digital analysis. Present the details of the DH project I’m working on using this list as a starting point [SLIDE 4] Images of sources – Book Women, LundinIn working on my book project on the professionalization of children’s literature experts, I look at a number of histories of early children's reading rooms in public libraries. (CLICK) Scholars like Leonard Marcus, Jacqueline Eddy, Beverly Lyon Clark and Anne Lundin pointed to early librarians like Hewins as the founding mothers of the children’s literature field. These “bookwomen” as Eddy calls them, gathered together all the texts that they could in order to justify space for themselves and children within the emerging public library system, and to advocate for a special set of books targeting the young. [SLIDE 5] Cover of Books for the YoungThe document I’m presenting today is Books for the Young, a guide for Parents and Children. It was compiled by Caroline M. Hewins, the Librarian of the Hartford Library Association in 1882. For historical context, the American Library Association was founded in 1876, its Children’s Section was founded in 1900 and the first children’s reading room opened in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1880 (Eddy 64). Books for the Young was the first title published by the Publishing Section of the ALA and so it exists at a particular nexus of interest for me; it’s a list and it marks a milestone in the professionalization of children’s librarians (Clark 69).[SLIDE 6] Images of Bookwomen – ACM Hewins was not the only librarian to compile a list of best books and taken with others, like Ann Carroll Moore’s “A List of Books Recommended for A Children’s Library,” gives researchers a clear picture of what the field of children’s literature looked like at the turn of the 20th century. One thing these lists had in common, is that each librarian proclaimed that her list collected the best books that existed for children at the moment but indicated a willingness to replace the titles on the list once better ones appear. [SLIDE 7] No children or dogs allowedI argue that in creating these lists and the expectation for future revision, these bookwomen laid out the standards by which “better books” would be judged. They readily indicated where some holes in coverage existed while failing to recognize other gaps, largely as a result of their own implicit biases. In what is a mark of professionalization within a field, these early librarians transformed their expertise, social characteristics and personal charisma into the “ineffable” qualities that make for a good expert in children’s literature. I argue this meant internalizing the personal preferences and internal biases of these bookwomen into the language we use to evaluate children’s books and even what we value in those books. [SLIDE 8] Computers are funWhen even when looking closely at one list, I tend to wonder about bigger questions, like what if I could trace the appearance and disappearance of titles starting from this list up through the contemporary ALA list of recommended children’s books? Or what did these books all have in common to make the cut into Hewins’s list? (CLICK) And then I started my fellowship at Georgia Tech and I don't know, I think they put something in the water there, because I found myself drawn to this idea of using COMPUTERS to answer these big questions. I have all this computing power and digital humanities scholars around me and with their help, I’ve been digging in to that very idea. [SLIDE 9] Close ReadingSo before I get more into that side of things into the DH side of things, I want to talk through some conclusions about this weird little primary text. The arguments I am making here are based in part on my own more traditional textual analysis from close readings but also from some preliminary digital analysis using Voyant’s text visualization software. [SLIDE 10] Parts of “Books for the Young” So, the pamphlet itself has five distinct parts: a 7 page Preface, written by Hewins herself; a 2 page list of best practices titled “How to teach the Right Use of Books”; an 8 page narrative describing a course of reading focused on teaching young children an appreciation for history titled “English and American History for Children”; a 12 page section of extended quotes and statements about how and what children should be reading from a variety of thinkers, literary critics and writers called “A Symposium on Books for Children”; then finally the 60 page list of Books for the Young that includes a wide variety of subjects, [SLIDE 11] Categories in Books for the Young list Hewins categorized these texts into sections that sound a little like Jeopardy categories, such as: Home and School Life; Modern Fairy Tales; Farming, Gardening, Plants and Trees; and Counsel and Example. While these categories clearly are very different from the ones we use today, Hewins does foreshadow designations that are more familiar by including notations for when a book is especially suitable for children under 10, for girls or for boys. [SLIDE 12] Close Reading – Images of Pages from HewinsThe first thing I noticed was how carefully Hewins has considered the texts she is recommending as well as how much she is reaching to find texts that can fit for a young audience. This is clearest in the section recommending a course of reading on English and American History. For example, she writes:[SLIDE 13] Actual quotes“Coffin's Story of liberty, which begins at Magna Charta and ends at the landing of the Pilgrims, is so fierce in its Protestantism and so bloody in its details that it causes pain to many a sensitive child, and should be read with much judicious skipping.”(18). She concludes further on in the same course of reading that “There is no good life of Napoleon written in a style to please young readers” 21). Its clear how seriously she takes this task of selecting appropriate material and she tells parents her concerns and work-arounds for particularly flawed texts. [SLIDE 14] Categories in Books for the Young listIn total, Hewins recommends 1005 titles over the course of her list (that number comes with a couple of minor caveats) by 393 individual authors (also with some caveats)*(Hans Brinker is listed twice, once under Home and School Life and once under Imaginary Voyages); (Marco Polo listed twice under the subcategories of Travel All Over the World and Travel in Asia) (There are a couple natural history texts listed in the original and abridged/illustrated version.) She was also inconsistent in recommending series; sometimes she’d write out all the titles, sometimes she’d just write “8 volumes”393 individual authors + 26 NONE LISTED = 419though this includes a few overlaps, such as where women wrote independently and also co-wrote with brothers or husbands, like Edward Everett and Susan Hale. There are places where names like J. T. Trowbridge and John T. Trowbridge register in the database as two separate authors but are in fact the same person. I’ve found at least one incorrect attribution and one case where she has listed both the real name and the pen name of the same author separately. The vast majority of those authors are from the British Isles or the US. All but one author is listed is white. [SLIDE 15] Close Reading: Field Biases What struck me while reading the text was how much of it would not be out of place in today’s conversations about children’s literature. Amongst the old texts, there were quite a few that we would point to today as classics of children’s literature such as: Water-babies, Swiss Family Robinson, Hans Brinker,the Princess and the Goblin, and Alice in Wonderland. [SLIDE 16] SymposiumThere are quotes from the symposium section that sound strikingly similar to those occasional articles that crop up in the Wall Street Journal or Salon, where someone overgeneralized statements about YA dystopian lit or why graphic novels are terrible for children and the kidlit community on Twitter has to take turns correcting assumptions and pointing to the vast areas of scholarship already existing on that topic. These sections excoriate the parents who let their kids read junk, assume kids have to be convinced that nonfiction can be interesting, and that this newfangled juvenile literature is crap and kids should just read Shakespeare (though not Julius Caesar, at least not this month). For example, a quote from the Dublin Review claims “Of all things in boys' books, what is the most detestable is the boy who fills his talk with slang, not the language of schoolboys, but the slang of the streets; the boy that is represented 'sharp,' as he himself would call it, putting older people down by his ready answers and self-assurance.”– DUBLIN REVIEW (April, 1882).(30)[SLIDE 17]The list also reinforces a lot of the gender stereotypes we see today. For example, 7 of 9 books in the engineering section is marked as especially of interest to boys. Hewins writes in her Preface, “In general it is harder to find good books for girls than for boys, although a girl who has not a precocious appetite for love-stories often enjoys the same stories that please her brother“ (5). [SLIDE 18] Boys and GirlsWe can see the precedent for this modern concern about the reluctant boy reader and the expectation that girls shouldn’t mind reading about male protagonists. [SLIDE 19] Boys and GirlsSo I assert that, perhaps unsurprisingly, this list preferences the education and needs of boy readers over girls. However, a digital analysis gives me hard data to support this claim: as you can see in this visualization, the word (CLICK 2x) boy/boys appears nearly 2 to 1 as much as (CLICK 2x) girl/girls. Further, an examination the context for each of those appearances, shows that the word “boy” appeared in an isolated context, the sole subject in a sentence 28 times, while the term “girls” was almost always used in the context of the phrase “boys and girls.” (CLICK 4x and make a face)[SLIDE 20] HistoryIn my initial analysis, I didn’t notice how heavily Hewins’s list is weighted towards historical texts, pushing the ultimate goal of training kids to read and enjoy nonfiction, especially history and biography. However, my initial exploration with the digital analytics indicated that “history” was the fifth most used word (37 times) in the first half, or prose section, of this pamphlet and in the list of titles, it is the most used word (49), meaning it appears in the title of 49 different books or nearly 5% of the texts.[Slide 21]However, I do think it is important to note that while Hewins places a heavy emphasis on narrations of history and of explorations of distant places, she makes no distinction between fiction and non-fiction. In her list, the category is titled “History, Historical Biography Tales and Novels” and conflates novels, personal accounts, biographies, and historical research with equal weight. For example, when suggesting texts about the founding of the United States, she writes: “Franklin's Autobiography is useful at this time, and also the beginning of a life of Washington. The student’s edition of Irving·is much better than the lives written for children. Thackeray’s Virginians and Cooper's Leather-stocking tales also illustrate the period” (19-20). She recommends an autobiography, a biography, and two novels as adequate reading to get a feel for the period, focusing on their narrative quality and storytelling ability rather than on veracity or completeness. [Slide 22] Nationality of authorWe can also note that her expressed goal is to get children interested in “their history” and recommends a list focuses strongly on England, France and the United States, with other texts focused on imperialistic conquering, exploration or war with other continents. This perhaps speaks to Hewins’s imagined child reader as well. [SLIDE 23] Transition from lit analysis to DH analysis So as you can see, this kind of digitally aided analysis of a text can help us to reinforce our own observations as well as lead us to new ones. [SLIDE 24] Research QuestionSo, as I mentioned, under the influence of the Georgia Tech atmosphere, I’ve been exploring ways in which we can use these same digital technologies to help answer some of my bigger questions. If we examine the actual texts on these lists around which the emerging canon of children’s literature was built at the turn of the 20th century, what implicit biases can we confirm and what additional biases can we uncover? So I think it is fair to say that we would expect to find data that supports a lot of current criticisms of our field being largely centered around white, US/European, heteronormative, Christian, able-bodied narratives but while compiling data on these biases may seem like restating the obvious, using specific data to quantify those biases gives us another tool to argue for a more inclusive vision of children’s literature as well as a valuable tool to track changes over time. How would a contemporary organization’s list of the top 100 books for children stack up to these standards? However, what other assumptions or biases exist? What might a computer analysis reveal about the writing styles, language patterns, or common plot points that drew Hewins to particular texts? If we created a similar corpus from Moore’s list, could we identify differences in temperament and preferences between these two women? Or discover which of the biases and personality traits of those librarians calcified into standards for the field? [SLIDE 25] Bestseller analysisThere are a couple of other projects out there that look at similar corpuses of texts, but I was particularly inspired by a project that examines bestseller lists (yes, I know I have an obsession). In their study “How Cultural Capital Works: Prizewinning Novels, Bestsellers, and the Time of Reading” Andrew Piper and Eva Portelance used text mining analysis to examine bestselling books, prize winning books and books reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, then used the results to discover trends in each category. The authors found that books that focused on (male) nostalgia were far more likely to be prize winners and that there was a correlation between appearing in the Book Review and becoming a prize winner. The same scholars then fed the text from prize winning novels and bestselling novels into the computer and asked it to predict what kind of book it was: the prediction rate was above 80% for each category of book.So, if we build a corpus of texts selected by early children’s librarians, and ran similar (or even more exciting, yet to be thought of) experiments, what kind of trends, themes, commonalities or key concepts might we reveal and how might it inform our understandings of the foundation of the children’s literature field and its canon of recommended texts? [SLIDE 26] Existing supportSo, while the questions are easy to ask, the actual construction of the database and corpus is incredibly time and labor intensive. Luckily, the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center at Georgia Tech has offered a good deal of support including the help of some computer science grad students to help me with the construction of the database and the computer modeling (thank goodness!) Also, I want to give special thanks to the undergraduate interns in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech, Albert Lee and Sarah Heywood, who even now are helping harvest existing metadata and locate full-text scans of the books on this list, so I can start moving forward with the larger data project. It is my goal to create the database for my research but to also secure an institutional partner (ahem the Baldwin ahem) to host the database and make it available to other scholars to run their own analysis or to build on to. [SLIDE 27] Further InterestSo I’m going to conclude here. ’m really looking forward to hearing more from the rest of the panel and look forward to the discussion at the end! Or I’m happy to chat more poolside. ................
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