Picturing Children's Stories is a citizen science project dedicated to uncovering how children's book illustrations have evolved over the past two centuries. By collecting detailed annotations of image content and emotional tone, we aim to build a rich, searchable record of visual storytelling for children. Your contributions will help scholars trace artistic trends, cultural shifts, and changing ideas about childhood. The data you help create will also support the development of AI tools that can scale this research to other, larger digital libraries, opening up new ways to explore the visual history of children’s literature.

 

Illustrations are an essential aspect of children's books. They help capture children's attention and inspire their imaginations while they learn to read or are read to by an adult. But they also encode important cultural values about childhood and storytelling. What are the objects, people, and emotions that different historical periods have focused on to educate young readers? How have these changed over time? At the same time, what facets of a story are brought to the forefront through illustrations? How have we "pictured" stories for young readers? Through your help we can surface details of children's book illustrations at much larger scale than ever before to study this pivotal creative artform and better understand the relationship between seeing and reading.

 

You will be given a page from a book with an illustration on it. The overall goal is to identify the main entities, objects, and emotional tone of the image.