Picturing Children's Stories

We have our first results!

What you did

• 902 volunteers took part in the initial phase of the project
• You completed over 450,000 annotations
• Together, you helped us identify and study 27,901 illustrations
• These images came from 2,827 historical children’s books
• The books were published between 1728 and 1932

What we found

What characters appear most often?

• To our surprise we found that men are the most frequent type of character in children's books
• Animals are the next most frequent, but talking animals are rare
• Imaginary and fantastic beings are also quite rare, again to our surprise
• Boys and girls appear at almost the same rate and more likely to appear together than with adults

Takeaway: Historical children's books maintain a strong priority around male leadership, while children's gender balance and independence suggests an interesting view of childhood as something separate from adulthood. Children are not more likely to be supervised but rather exist in groups. Childhood in the nineteenth century is social and independent.

Where is childhood reading set?

• Most scenes happen outdoors, not indoors.
• Nature (trees, fields, animals) is the most common background.

Takeaway: This suggests that childhood was overwhelmingly shown to be connected to the natural world.

How emotional are scenes in children's books?

• To our surprise, we found children's book illustrations covered the full spectrum of emotional intensity. There was a broad range of activity from very calm to very intense.
• Overall there was a slight bias towards more calm than more intense.

Takeaway: Childhood is depicted as participating in the full range of the emotional spectrum, from very calm (sleeping babies) to very intense (boys climbing trees).

Why this matters

• This is the first large-scale study of children’s book illustrations. No one has yet studied children's book at this scale before.
• Your work helps historians understand how ideas about childhood, gender, nature, and emotion were shaped through images.
• The dataset you helped create will also be used to build better, more transparent AI tools for studying history and culture and for helping to make these kinds of images more searchable and accessible.

THANK YOU!!

You can read the full paper here.