Update: Dr. Vivian Howard of Dalhousie University will be visiting SLAIS on Wednesday November 20^th to give a formal colloquium on children’s literature (details below). She has also agreed to participate in a second event on the same day – an informal discussion on her research in young adult and girls’ reading patterns, Atlantic children’s literature and depictions of race in picture books – at a coffee gathering with students on Wednesday November 20^th from 10 am to 11 am at SLAIS in the Greig Research room.

Vivian Howard
Associate Dean Academic and Associate Professor
School of Information Management, Dalhousie University

Title: Connecting Authors and Readers: Researching and Documenting Atlantic Canadian Books for Youth
Date: November 20, 2013, 11:30 am–12:30 pm
Location: Dodson Room, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

ABSTRACT

In their recent history of Canadian children’s illustrated books, Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman observe that “the children’s literature of a nation is a microcosm of that country’s literary and sociocultural values, beliefs, themes, and images, including those of geography, history, and identity.” This lecture will explore the importance of regional Atlantic Canadian children`s literature and the development of Sea Stacks (http://www.seastacks.ca), an authoritative web-based resource featuring information on and about Atlantic Canadian books, authors and illustrators for children and youth.  Sea Stacks includes comprehensive annotated bibliographies of primary texts, author and illustrator profiles, videotaped interviews, analysis, and criticism.
This presentation will demonstrate the use of Sea Stacks for research and will conclude with a discussion of the relevance of Ian McKay’s provocative 1994 text The Quest for the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia to an analysis of contemporary Nova Scotian picture books.

BIO

Vivian Howard is associate professor in the School of Information Management and Associate Dean Academic of the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University.  Her research interests include barriers and motivators for pleasure reading, particularly for young readers; social reading initiatives; and Atlantic Canadian literature for children and teens.  She is the editor of the YA Hotline newsletter and is the principal investigator of a research team developing the Sea Stacks website.