In our group meeting, we reported our progress on our individual tasks, as well as the work that needed to be done due to our expansion of the project.
- The team is very happy with the overall design of the website. Emily reviewed the suggested sites and recommended we create additional pages, including pages for our visualizations and infographics.
- Meg wrote our first blog post and will post it on the website by the end of this week. We discussed possible content for future blogs and how often we should post. Besides recommending books, we will write project updates and in-depth features. For example, a post examining how African Americans were portrayed in the Caldecott books with selected illustrations. Meg will handle blogging, although any team member can contribute.
- We discussed the importance of a strong social media presence for our project. So many award authors and organizations are using social media right now, which makes this is the perfect time for us to connect with them and raise awareness of our project. Meg will handle our social media accounts.
- Kelly provided an overview of the Caldecott data that she scraped and cleaned. The data suggests that there are earlier instances of diversity (in contributors and subject matter) in the Caldecott books as compared to the Newbery books. Also, several illustrators were honored multiple times so collecting identity information will be quicker than with the Newbery authors. We will follow the guidelines we set for the Newbery data when finding identity information for the Caldecott.
- I discussed how my search for historical data on children’s publishing is faring. Besides the statistics from the CCBC, I found articles from 1965 and 1985 that includes data about African Americans in children’s books. The data from the 1965 article seems to be flawed, because the questionnaire asked for books including African Americans instead of about African Americans. For example, a biography on Abraham Lincoln was counted as a book including African Americans since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The data from the CCBC however is books about African Americans. I will continue my search for data, but the 1965 article could be useful for inclusion in a blog post.
This week the team will focus on the following:
Emily and I will collect Caldecott author and illustrator identity information. Kelly will go back to working on the Newbery visualizations, which we will eventually send out for feedback. Meg will create the slides for the class presentation next week and post content on our social media accounts.
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