Séance du 4 mai 2023: Max van Duijn & Bram van Dijk (Universiteit Leiden), et Benoît Crucifix (KU Leuven & KBR)
Max van Duijn & Bram van Dijk (Universiteit Leiden): “She loved the waves but never came back”. Perceptions, emotions, speech, and thought in children’s spontaneous stories
Story characters not only perform actions, they also perceive, feel, communicate, and think. We discuss patterns of Speech and Thought Representation (STR) occurring across different age groups in ChiSCoR, our recent corpus containing 700+ stories told freely by children aged 4-12. Our aim is to integrate a quantitative-descriptive approach with a more in-depth qualitative discussion of the role various patterns play in how children relay their stories’ plots. In addition, we explore whether contextual linguistic features, extracted automatically using computational tools, can be used to classify different ways in which character viewpoints are rendered.
Benoît Crucifix (KU Leuven & KBR): Learning from a schoolbag of homemade comics
Alongside his collection of illustrated periodicals, acquired by Ghent University libraries, Alain Van Passen passed along a battered leather schoolbag, filled with hundreds of hand-drawn pages of comics and related sketches, made between 1949 and 1952 from age 8 to 11. As a rare testimony of reader reception and appropriation of mass-market print culture, this schoolbag offers a fascinating “object lesson” for childhood studies. This paper tries to unpack what it tells us about serial reading practices in the postwar and children’s creative practices, and considers the challenges of reading and preserving such material.
