Picturing Children's Stories

Picturing Children's Stories is a citizen science project aimed at deepening our understanding of how children's book illustrations have changed over the past two centuries. With your help, we are collecting detailed descriptions of image content and emotional tone in historical picture books. These annotations will allow scholars to trace how illustrators have depicted childhood, storytelling, and emotion across time—revealing the evolving values used to educate and entertain young readers. Your contributions make it possible to study this creative form at a scale never before possible.

The books in this project come from the Children's Book collection of the Internet Archive, but we envision much broader applications. The data you help generate will also support the development of AI tools that can extend this research to large digital libraries around the world. Our goal is not to generate art with AI, but to use it as a tool for exploring cultural history. Like all Citizen Reader projects, Picturing Children’s Stories is about expanding human knowledge of storytelling. We hope you’ll enjoy diving into the visual legacy of children’s books while contributing to its scholarly study.

Image Credit: Randolph Caldecott, "Frog He Would A-Wooing Go" (1883)