Kate McDowell on Storytelling

I remember talking in college about "The Linguistic Turn" in academic perspectives that had occurred some 30 years before we got to academia.  These articles/chapters all make me think that perhaps there has since been an "Everyday Life Turn" of equal importance (as Sheringham, below, argues).  From the everyday information behavior of children and tweens to the everyday significance of racial micro-aggressions (more coming soon, as I prep for the second Reading Around Race group), it seems to me that there's something to this argument that the everyday has become at least a major rhetorical part of the direction of research in many disparate fields. First, here's an example of the kind of "everyday life" research that I often read, related to children and libraries: "Leisure and Work in Library and Community Programs for Very Young Children" by Roz Stooke and Pamela J. McKenzie ( Library Trends  57: 4, Spring 2009) After observin...

This post is the first of what I hope will be a regular feature, a quick look through my recent Article Amassment.  Be they print journals or citations emailed me by colleagues, Article Amassment is all about fast skimming/reading a bunch of articles related to some aspect of youth services librarianship and blogging them here.  I expect entries to be more like abstracts or even annotations than summaries, with my own slant, of course.  So here goes, my first ever Article Amassment: Large, Andrew, et al.  "Developing a Visual Taxonomy:  Children's Views on Aesthetics"  JASIST 60(9): 2009, pp. 1808-1822. Bring together visualization and usability testing/design, with seven 6th grade young people as collaborators.  Includes children's prototype drawings of taxonomies, and uses them to suggest six aesthetic characteristics that should characterize such browsing interfaces for children, including "maplike metaphor."  They come up with si...

Goodstein, Anastasia. Totally Wired. Written in an easy-to-read journalistic style, Goodstein covers all the essentials of teen technology use for bewildered parents (or librarians). Though parts are redundant with Harris (see below), both are of use to future youth services librarians. Chapters 1-4 deal with teens, and then chapters 5-7 address what adults can or should do about all the things teens are doing. Mostly, Goodstein calls for understanding, relating contemporary tech activities such as IMing to her own 80s-era teen experiences such as 3-way calling. I Found It on the Internet. Harris, France Jacobson. Though it's short, the book is worth reading as written, in 3 parts, one at a time. Part 1 parallels the first 4 chapters of Goodstein. Part 2 is a little different, in that it lumps all the dangers-and-dark-sides together. Part 3 is for adults, and would go well as a parallel reading to Goodstein's chapters 5-7. Although the writing is more laden, the audien...

I skimmed the above book at rapid-fire pace today, and here's what I came away with: Jenkins is all about how multiple forms of media allow consumers to become participants. He wrote chapters on the group that tried to sleuth out how each season of Survivor would end by analyzing the footage frame-by-frame, the American Idol participatory phenomenon, and the Matrix with its "transmedia storytelling" through 3 movies, games, and websites. Jenkins writes: "Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making." And I think of all those fantasy novelists who have always been involved with world making, but their worlds were specific to the medium of print. Except when there were also role playing games... "Transmedia storytelling" is an interesting idea, and one I imagine I'll be mulling over for awhile. Finally, he has a chapter on Harry Potter, which I know I'll be assigning to my students for next fall, because it's all about children a...

The Digital and Traditional Storytimes Research Project. By: Collen, Lauren . Children & Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children , Winter2006, Vol. 4 Issue 3, p8-18, 11p Fascinating article on using books from the International Children's Digital Library in storytimes, but there were a few things I left the article wondering... First, the comparison of size was page-to-monitor, but no info was given about the size of the projection in front of the children. How did it compare to standard big books? Second, the comparison was between a standard storytime with a reader and book in the front of the room and a storytime with a projection of a book from the ICDL with a reader sitting "in the audience" with the children. Collen concludes that children pay better attention to the digital story, but she doesn't account for this major difference. Children, given a storyteller who is a live and interesting person, will invariably ask ...