Newbery Group Update

Stage One (2/19-3/19)

  • Planning & Research: Research proper race/ethnic terms for protagonist. Research critical race theory and find articles on Newbery Awards and diversity in children’s literature.
  • Content Development: Complete the Google Spreadsheet of Author Breakdown. Complete the Google Spreadsheet for Protagonist Breakdown
  • Design: Sketch up outline of website: each page (Home, About, Methods, Data) using WordPress through Commons. Future Page Suggestions: Social Media, Suggested Reading, and Infographic.
  • Outreach & Publicity: Set up social media accounts for the project. RT news on diverse books (and other suggestions). Create an email address.

Referring to our Project Work Plan, we have met our milestones in Stage One. We researched critical race theory, overall diversity in children’s books, and found articles discussing the Newbery Awards. We completed the Author and Protagonist Breakdown of Newbery Medal and Honor Winners and are creating initial visualizations. We drafted a website and created social media accounts and an email address for outreach. (Instagram & Twitter: whowinswithbookawards; gmail: newbookaward@gmail.com.)

Since we are ahead of schedule, the team decided to expand the project to include Caldecott Medal and Honor Books in our analysis. We will finish collecting the data by next week, and will have visualizations for both Awards by the end of Stage Two (March 20-April 19).

Our primary focus this week is to scrape the remaining Caldecott data and manually collect author and protagonist identity information. We also hope to get a set of visualizations together that we feel are ready for outside feedback. We recognize that current global circumstances may slow the feedback process, so having the Caldecott data to play with will give us good purpose as we wait.

We will also post our first blog and create social media content promoting diverse award books parents can read with their children-thanks Bret for the suggestion. Regarding the website, we are researching accessibility and will make any changes necessary before asking others for feedback. This week we will look at the website examples Bret sent to determine if there are any additional pages or layouts we want to include.

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