children's electronic literature

Digital children’s literature is a relatively recently established field of research that has been seeking for its theoretical base and defining its position and scope. Its major attention so far has been on the narrative app, a new form of children’s literature displayed on a touchscreen computational device.

The narrative app came into being around 2010, and immediately attracted the attention of the academics. So far, various studies have been conducted to explore its educational potential, but very few have investigated the app for what it is in its own right. To bridge the gap, this study has explored the nature of the narrative app and the essential principles of its narrative strategies.

As the subject of this study concerns a variety of disciplines, this research has been conducted in an extremely interdisciplinary way in order to develop a thorough understanding of the narrative app. In general, it has consulted scholarship in children’s literature (picturebook studies in particular), narratology, computer science, game studies, social semiotics, film studies, media studies, communication studies, electronic literature and game design.

With this interdisciplinary approach, this study has attempted to define the subject of the study, identify some tendencies in its development, and most importantly, develop an original theory of storytelling and a narrative map that may be able to explain the intrinsic methods used in the narrative app storytelling as well as other digital and non-digital storytelling. The findings of this study seem to suggest that the narrative app does not display any essential differences from the codex and other forms of literature in terms of its narrative strategies, but it appears to have great potential to truly innovate storytelling.

It is suggested that this study may provide an effective theoretical scope and methodology for the study of the field of digital children’s literature, which may offer the potential to strengthen this field of research. The theoretical framework constructed by this study may be applicable to some educational approaches to the narrative app, and may also be useful for teaching new literacies.

Some children story apps have incorporated a reflexivity typical of the metafictive picturebook but this reflexivity is altered in the digital medium by the possibility of interaction – as the reader is addressed by the story, there is in interactive texts the possibility of a response that affects the narrative. The construction of metafiction is also changed by the extended multimodality of these texts, that now incorporate movement and sound, for example, creating a different kind of immersion from that promoted by the image-writing dynamics of the print picturebook. In this paper, I will discuss the realization of metafiction through the participation of the reader in the app The Monster at the End of This Book (Stone & Smollin, 2011).

(Source: Author's Abstract at ICDMT 2016)

As publishers of children’s e-books – the first publishing house of exclusively digital books for children in Brazil – we are part of an editorial market consolidated for centuries and, at the same time, we participate in the production of digital contents, which puts our hybrid production in a point of union between past and future. (…) The experience we are building with this publishing house of children’s e-books in the present political, social and cultural context in Brazil unites transdisciplinary pedagogical and editorial knowledge, using them as instruments that allow the maintenance of what historically is understood as children’s literature: a space for varied languages and many authorships.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

What kind of readers are we going to find with children’s electronic literature? Are“strong” and “weak readers” useful tags any longer? Are these digital reading skills and literary behaviors equal to those required with analogic texts? This paper presents an exploratory research on different children’s electronic literary reading profiles. We will analyze the affective relations of four 11–12 –year-old children with the digital works, their interpretative tendencies and their consideration of the literary properties that define this new literary paradigm.
For this purpose, we introduced five interactive tablets loaded with a selected corpus of literary apps for five months into the reading environment of an elementary classroom. Two pairs of students were selected based on their analogic literary reading profiles—two of them were considered strong readers and the other two “weak” ones—and interviewed in two different moments of the research process. Both interviews were recorded and transcribed for further analysis. The content structure of both interviews was designed based on a deep analysis of the particularities of this new reading context (Cassany, Prensky), as well as a close reading of the electronic works we selected for it, and the specific literary properties that defined them (Hayles, Ryan, Murray, etc.).
The emerging relations between student’s traditional reading skills and e-lit reading requeriments were analyzed in the light of contemporary children’s literary education studies (Chambers, Colomer, Tauveron, etc.), the above-mentioned theoretical works on electronic literature and ludologic taxonomies of gamers types. As a result of this multidisciplinary perspective, a qualitative and exploratory categorization of these four reader types is aims to help future researches of electronic literature and literary education.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)