Dr. Naomi Hamer's Talk "Enter Through the Gift Shop"

Hello scholars!

We are so excited to invite you to Dr. Naomi Hamer’s talk, “Enter through the Gift Shop: Transmedia Storytelling and the Picture Book from Mobile Apps to Museums”.  Dr. Hamer’s talk will be February 19, 2020 4:00 to 5:30pm in Love Library 430. We are always so grateful for such insightful talks, and we know this one will be no different!

Dr. Naomi Hamer is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University. Her current research and publications examine the cross-media adaptation of children's literature with a focus on picture books, mobile apps, and children’s museums. She is the co-editor of More Words About Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People (eds. Hamer, Nodelman and Reimer, 2017), and The Routledge Companion of Fairy-tale Cultures and Media (eds. Greenhill, Rudy, Hamer, and Bosc, 2018). Her current research project (Curating the Story Museum) has been awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.

This lecture presents highlights from her ongoing research on the adaptation, remediation, and commodification of picture books. This work focuses on how transmedia storytelling offers opportunities for counterpoint and disruptive narratives by authors and readers of picture books while also addressing the limitations of interactive and mobile technologies. Framed by cross-disciplinary work on transmedia storytelling and digital cultures, cross-media case studies of canonical picture books reveal the absences and omissions in the texts chosen by publishing houses, entertainment companies, and children's museums for adaptations and exhibitions focused on picture books. The lives and experiences of Indigenous youth, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, and young people of color (and their families) are only recently featured as central to picture books, and tend to be less likely the focus for dominant cross-media franchises. This lecture particularly explores the development of the Pism Finds her Miskanow story app (2019) as well as select examples from picture book exhibitions as venues for dialogue and play with picture book narratives.

Leading up to the talk you can find Dr. Hamer on Twitter @naomihamertime to get to know her!

We look forward to seeing you there!

-(SS)

Interview with Linda Salem- Children’s Literature Subject Specialist at the SDSU Love Library (Part 2 of 2)

This week is part two of the blog post from our amazing interview with Linda Salem. If you didn’t get a chance to read it yet, Linda is SDSU’s very own Children’s Literature Library Specialist at the San Diego State University’s Love Library. 

Storytelling is one of Linda’s key interests, and this lead to an interesting conversation regarding the history of children’s stories through oral tradition, into what they are becoming today: e-books. There is a curiosity to understand e-books and if they should be accepted into the education community. Will e-books for children have the same effect as their counterparts in print?

When asked about the motives of children selecting their own stories, Linda responded, "When they come to the library, children sometimes have a topic, a character, or just an idea in mind and they would like to see a book about it." There is a level of certainty that children project for a type of story they might be interested in reading.

Of course I had to ask Linda what her take was on modern day fairy tales that are consuming pop-culture. She suggested that these new fairy tales and the new methods that they are being told through are a continuum of the change that stories must go through. She explained how oral tales turned into printed books and those became fancier with color prints and popup art, then adapted into large motion pictures, and finally became stories that lay face-up on an LED screen device in brightly lit images and sounds captivating the child’s attention and perhaps even our own. Linda mentioned that the previous semester a composer had contacted her for a list of fairy tales that she thought would make good symphonic composition. There is really no end to where fairy tales and storytelling for children will go next.

So in the case of the e-books, Linda as the library specialist of Children’s Literature is faced with a tough question when it is time to select books for the collection. If the book is available in the e-reader format, does that overtake the need to purchase a physical copy? Linda says selecting the print or e-book format depends on many factors.

We spent some time looking through different and neat iPad apps of e-books that incorporated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with music, read-out-loud settings, or interactive animation (Atomic Antelope). "Ebooks editions are often media enhanced editions that may be seen as an expansion of the narrative form."

Ultimately, these examples for the evolution of storytelling perhaps make a statement about where children’s book culture is going. And really in a way, storytelling has come miles since its oral tradition. Now children are exposed to stories with graphics, activities, and music; consider not that this may be a distraction to the story itself, but that now stories incorporate so many other senses and create a new experience for the reader. The experience of the reader is changing in general with e-books, audiobooks, and movies, so why not allow children to adapt with                                                                        this shift at the same time?

The final question I had for Linda was regarding the overall study of children’s literature as a newer form of scholarship and the significance it creates in the academic field. Perhaps this question served a need for reaffirming that children’s literature is not invaluable or easy to glance over because it is merely for children. Linda says that in her work with the Children's Literature Society affiliated with the American Literature Association she sees topics of scholarship growing. She and co-editor Dr. Dorothy Clark have an edited book of essays in press now entitled Frontiers in Children's Literature; this book explores this expansion of scholarship through contributions from exciting scholars working in the field today. Also, The Children's Literature Association or ChLA at http://www.childlitassn.org is a wonderful place to start to learn more about the direction of scholarship in this subject.

The importance of stories and books through any medium is the establishment of literacy, period. So while e-books do not have the comfort of musty pages that hold history with their own existence, they are part of our evolution. Current generations of children will grow into the adults that analyze these texts in ways we cannot comprehend yet. And sometimes it takes getting to know your local librarian to understand the bigger picture of what books of all kinds really mean. 

Links to Ponder (Thursday Edition)

Before the end of the week arrives, take a moment to peruse the following articles and issues that have cropped up lately. The topics presented here either raise or challenge questions that I feel are constantly prevalent in the discussion of children and "their" literature.

1. A recent NY Times  article titled The Stories That Bind Us discusses impact that family narratives have on children's development. "The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned."  Simply by the act of storytelling. The article describes in brief the research efforts of psychologists from Emory University in assessing this hypothesis. It could have continued into a larger analysis on the implications of sharing family history, traditions, positive moments--particularly, the history and importance of oral narratives at all. Storytelling, especially for young people, takes on a deeper purpose and suddenly does not seem so "childish".

2. You may have heard or read about the ongoing battle over Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis in the Chicago Public School system. Originally it had been announced that the graphic novel would be removed from classrooms and school libraries, but that decision has since been altered and with the Chicago Board of Education's approval, it will remain in libraries but not be taught in 7th to 10th classes for now, only accessible to 11-th and 12th graders. Evidently officials fear presenting children with images and stories that include torture and violence, despite the growing relevance of those acts in our culture today. Is it inappropriate? Do we consider children incapable of handling these issues? And don't they realize that if you ban something as substantial as this, you will inspire protests and increase sales of the book in question--evidently one would be hard-pressed to find Persepolis in Chicago bookstores right now.

3. A little bit of interesting to wrap things up: Century of the Child: Growing by Design (1900-2000) Maria Popova highlights and describes the companion book to a the New York MOMA exhibit: "Through 100 years of toys, playgrounds, classrooms, clothing, furniture, posters, animation, books, and other ephemera, it covers such expansive and interrelated subjects as genetic engineering, the role of play in cultivating creativity, the importance of children in expanding 20th-century economies, the rise of comic strips, and the cultural significance of nostalgia."