RShop team completes study

At the beginning of 2024, CDIC reached out to the McMaster University’s Office of Community Engagement (OCE), requesting support in researching some of the hypothetical factors related to the decision to contribute (or not) to CDIC’s collection. In no time, the OCE had a dynamic team put together under their Research Shop program.

The multidisciplinary team, led by Syed Mahamad, included Hamza Abouiznied, Mia Brufatto, Lily Li, and Lina Mabayyed undertook to identify motivations and barriers influencing the preservation of children’s artwork by families, and contributions to CDIC. Understanding these factors is crucial to increase CDIC’s ability to educate the public on the significance of children’s art and preserve it for future generations.

In total, 113 participants aged between 18 and 64 completed the online survey, and all Canadian provinces plus three territories were represented.

The team produced a report filled with never before documented insights on children’s art conservation as personal, family, or cultural heritage. Ninety (80%) of the survey participants reported that their parents saved their artwork when they were children, is but one such insight.

The study reveals that the main motivations for preserving children’s artwork within the home are:

  • Tracking the child’s artistic and personal development
  • Appreciating the artwork’s aesthetic value, and
  • Maintaining emotional connections to the pieces.

By far, the biggest barriers to preserving artwork in the home were a lack of space to physically store the artwork and time constraints.

Regarding contributing to the CDIC archive, the main motivating factors were:

  • The opportunity to share and celebrate the artwork with a broader audience,
  • The child desires to contribute to the archive, and
  • Receiving incentives, including crediting the child as the artist and/or small giveaways.

Factors that discouraged participants from contributing to the archive included:

  • A lack of knowledge about the CDIC and its mission,
  • Perceived logistical challenges with the artwork submission process, and
  • Reluctance within the family to part with the original artwork.

The research team included recommendations based on their findings. The new knowledge emerging from the study will help CDIC to review its communication tools, as well as its collection development strategies.

At this point, it seems that CDIC should simultaneously address the need of families that seek as much exposure as possible for their images, and the need of families that prefer a restrained access limited only for archival and research purposes.

Stay tuned to see how CDIC will adapt for better serve contributing families, and reach out to other collection users. For the great project partnership, CDIC would like to thank the research team, as well as Evan Gravely and the Office of Community Engagement, at McMaster University.

Reasons why participants were interested in contributing to the CDIC archive. Source: McMaster University, 2024.

It smells like dinosaur

From Godzilla to Barney, and all the Jurassic Park sequels in between, it is safe to say that almost every kid has drawn a dinosaur or two at some point.

The bones of real dinosaurs are preserved and displayed all over the world. They help us understand and admire their bygone animal supremacy.

Did you know that specialists also care for their feces? Yes, dinosaur poop has its own museum! Well, actually a museum for feces that have mineralized, and turned into coprolites.

The Poozeum was first launched as an online resource in 2014, by its founder George Frandsen. Ten years later, it recently opened its physical gallery and storefront in Williams, Arizona, not far from the Grand Canyon. Poozeum holds the largest of such collections, with about 8,000 coprolites. It holds a Guinness World Record for it, and also for holding the largest coprolite (67,5 cm x 15,7 cm) ever found, which George Frandsen says likely comes from a T.rex.

Next time you draw a dinosaur, don’t you forget its coprolite. Who knows, maybe one day we will find out that the whole planet is but one humongous spinning orbiting coprolite, or a derivative thereof.

Founder George Frandsen strikes the pose at the Poozeum. Source: Poozeum, 2024.

A take on family estrangement

Building a collection such as CDIC’s often means bumping into difficult questions and hurdles. Children’s drawings have nearly all vanished for centuries, even millennia. There are basically two reasons for that. One is that there is little value attached to them, and by extension children, because of the temporary nature of childhood. Either they grow too fast, or we just cannot wait for them to grow up. The other reason is that even if great value is given to learning and art made by children, it is generally a personal value shared and enjoyed in private among family members, not with the community. It is for the family scrapbook only.

In our efforts to expand the conversation about preservation, we wonder what triggers some individuals and some parents to hang on to those fragile objects. We also ask ourselves, is there a best time for families to contribute items to the collection? It is hard to say. The best time is probably when both the parent and the child agree to let the original image leave home. That is in the case of a young child. If the child has become an adult and has childhood art, likely preserved by a parent, this person may have lost interest in the image, or may want to honor the parent who kept it safe.

When a family keeps child art pieces for a long time, it looks like a positive sign for their preservation. It likely means that the initial impulse sprung from a strong bond between the child and the parent. It could however turn out to be the opposite, and the longer a family keeps the art, the more endangered it becomes. This is because like any other relationships, family bonds can fluctuate over time.

Adult children sometime grow apart from their parents or their siblings. When this happens, physical objects that they shared in the past come to take different meanings. The value and meaning of any art from childhood change, and may become dispensable. Family estrangement, when it happens, can put conservation of children’s art at risk.

The decision to preserve or not children’s art is and will remain in the hands of individuals and parents. Our participatory approach to collection development aims to add a collective or community layer to the equation. Our hope is that this will stimulate dialogue between generations, and cultural awareness.

Family estrangement has been under the scrutiny of a small number of scholars over the past ten years. They inform us that several factors can bring family members to stop interacting with one another. Family members can keep their distances for various periods of time, from a few months, to years, or for life. They can sometime grow apart gradually, without even explicitly knowing why. A pioneer on the subject is Dr. Kylie Agllias, adjunct lecturer at the University of NewCastle, in Australia. Her book Family estrangement: A matter of perspective (Routledge, 2016) is a go to reference. Gerontologist Dr.Karl Pillemer of Cornell University also authored the book Fault lines: Fractured families and how to mend them (Penguin, 2022). His book has a significant portion on resilience and reconciliation. In 2015, the British organization Stand Alone conducted a groundbreaking survey. Over eight hundred people responded. Their findings were published in the report by psychologist Dr. Lucy Blake, of the Centre for Family Research at University of Cambridge: Hidden voices: Family estrangement in adulthood, and available online. It is most revealing of some aspects of modern life.

Family members. By Léo, c1969s. Source: CDIC-CIDE.

April fool for real

Will an April 1st come when pranks and their fools will go unnoticed? Maybe we have already reached this point.

In recent years, we have seen the proliferation of fake news, as well as reciprocal foreign interference through social media. Add to this the several armed conflicts across the globe, of which many say the first victim is truth itself.

We thought we would make things real this year, by sharing our April Fools image with you. The pencil drawing was made in Quebec, during World War II. It is a long standing French tradition to stick a small fish on the back of an unsuspecting victim on April 1st. Interestingly, it was not preserved by the young girl who made it, nor by her mother, but rather by her older sister. It is now part of Lisette Tremblay’s fonds in our collection.

April Fool. By Bérangère Tremlay, c1944. Source: CDIC-CIDE.

Anthropomorphism

It is a vast and complex subject, as old as storytelling itself in current and past civilizations. This ability we have to project human features and qualities to non-human animals, plants and things is so omnipresent, we just have to glance at gamer avatars, or our sport team mascots to measure its far reaching impact. It can be found in basically any art form.

A short blog post cannot dive into the intricate complexity and ramifications of anthropomorphism. This post is meant to highlight the fact that some researchers with various backgrounds are increasingly questioning how the, let’s call them traditional storytellers, are making use of anthropomorphism. So, parents, writers, illustrators, playwrights, and even clerics, pay attention because a diverse group of literary critiques, cognitive scientists, social theorists and ecologists want to talk about anthropomorphism as a double edged sword.

On one hand, there are the well-known benefits, as mentioned by Nigerian researcher Helen Adhuze, in an article titled The face and phases of anthropomorphism in children literature, “Anthropomorphized characters boost empathy in children.  This relational attitude is facilitated through the human imagination operational at the various stages of human development. Essentially,  anthropomorphism  is  a  human attitude  developed  as  a  child  and  maintained through adulthood.  It is a specific human attitude, not a childish mistake.” (Adhuze, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, Vol. 1, no. 1, 2022)

Growing up, we become experts “anthropomorphers.” Parents and educators know too well how anthropomorphic characters can be efficient attention grabbers, and motivation boosters for children engagement. For example, take this school activity developed by Creative Exchange, a collaboration project of the England Arts Council and Durham University (United Kingdom). The activity shows “How to use anthropomorphism to release children’s creativity,” to develop their imagination and collaborative skills. The vast majority of contents in elementary school libraries include anthropomorphic images.

Not everyone agrees that anthropomorphism has only benefits, and some give it a thumb down, pointing to what may loom in its shadow. We find much of these warnings in an exhibition catalogue, of Animals Are Us: Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature; Celebrating  the Peter Solomon Collection. The exhibition was presented in 2021 at the Houghton Library, in Cambridge. The catalogue by Thomas Hyry and several others, offers a great reading experience, and includes awesome illustrations. Four contributors penned the chapter “The Pitfalls and Potential of Anthropomorphism in children Literature.” It shows clearly how the practice more than often perpetuates stereotypes and demonstrates blatant lack of representation and diversity. We cannot help, it seems, but project both our virtues and flaws into whatever we want to make more human. The authors raise important red flags, and see greater awareness as an important step for better storytelling.

They close with a glimpse of optimism, saying that as fields such as childhood studies, psychology, and literacy education developed their understanding of the child reader, children’s literature also evolved to position children as more purposeful, thoughtful, and agentive”(Animals Are Us exhibition catalogue, p.23)

In 2014, psychologists Patricia Ganea, Caitlin Canfield, and Kadria Simons-Ghafari investigated and concluded that anthropomorphism will actually inhibit children’s ability to learn actual facts about the animal world. It is, they argued, as if the fantastic nature of anthropomorphic characters “may not only lead to less learning but also influence children’s conceptual knowledge of animals.” In their article Do cavies talk? The effect of anthropomorphic picture books on children’s knowledge about animals (Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 5, 2014), they explain that there is a range of anthropomorphism that goes between a completely fantastic and a partially realistic characterization. They saw that when selecting books for their students, teachers tend to favor less realistic images, and rarely choose books where animal characters are shown in their natural environment. This, they say, may bring children to a lack of understanding of biological aspects of animals. In other words, children should be told when they are exposed to anthropomorphized creatures, told that it is not factual information, even when this might seems obvious to adults.

If you think educators, psychologists and literary critics are the only ones interested in the subject, think twice. Scholars in computer sciences, as well as religious studies are also showing interest in how children go about anthropomorphism. See what some of them have to say in this amazing book When Children Draw Gods A Multicultural and Interdisciplinary Approach to Children’s Representations of Supernatural Agents, published by Springer in 2023, as part of a book series New Approach to the Scientific Study of Religion. The chapter by Gregory Dessart and Pierre-Yves Brandt, Humanness and Non-Humanness in Children’s Drawings of God: A Case Study from French-Speaking Switzerland is of particular interest. It presents a case study with a focus on de-anthropomorphization as a progressive process. According to them, children undertaking religious education could be less inclined to portrait God with human traits.

As I reflect about the scientific articles cited above, isn’t it interesting that ecologically minded educator and religion educator might each hope that children be less impacted by anthropomorphism each for a different motive, the first for giving access to biological facts, and the other for less human-like representations of the divine? The socio-emotional power of anthropomorphism is immense. Is it too strong or misleading? It is an important question.

You want more anthropomorphic images? See this quickly read, well-illustrated article by Meagan Jones, on the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies’ website: Degrees of Humanity: Anthropomorphism and its development in children’s book illustration (2013).

portrait, landscape, religion, crayons, paper, 1960s
Great (detail) as in God is Great. By Leo, c1969. Source: CDIC-CIDE.

World Children’s Day 2023

Children should mean the world to us all, but still so many are suffering, even dying, east and west, north and south. This November 20th, we join a large number or not-for-profit organizations worldwide in denouncing the neglect and aggression on children.

Let us all familiarize ourselves better with children’s rights, and take part in open dialogue and civic participation in support of children’s safety and growth. There are many good sources of information at our fingertips on Internet. Take for example the research and reports by KidsRights, based in Amsterdam. Their findings are up to date and their programs involve youth directly, in nearly forty countries.

Meanwhile, as reported from the United Nation’s meeting of the committee on Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Issues this past October, you could hear national representatives throw the blame at each other regarding children’s safety worldwide. It is certainly a positive thing that they have the conversation, but the tone and good will should definitely improve.

In Canada this November 25th, the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children will host a webinar titled Youth Researchers’ Peer-to-Peer PAR Journey and Findings. For this occasion, youth researchers will discuss their work and findings. The webinar is open to children and youth who are interested. It is free and pre-registration is required.

Burning house. By Yvon, c1967. Source: CDIC-CIDE.

Hold that deep thought

Pundits of so-called artificial intelligence are only starting to surprise us with demonstrations of how this new tool can change the way we look at, and think about children’s art.

Computer scientists use different apparatus to achieve classification and analysis of children’s drawings, their elements, or processes that create them. To put it simply, they use digital visual recognition and mathematical models to build deep learning machines. Inspired by observations and studies made by humans, they sometimes compare the types and number of characteristics and categories which computers can process, with that of human scrutiny, in terms of accuracy.

Researchers who aim at developing tools for ever more efficient analysis of children’s drawings, will often prefer providing touchscreens to participants, and leave aside the pen and paper. This is a bit odd because not only drawing on a screen is a far cry from drawing on paper, but also the proportion of children who have access to a touchscreen is and will remain marginal for quite some time. This raises the serious question of whose drawings they are really talking about.

Take for example a study published in Alexandria Engineering Journal (Vol. 60, issue 1) in 2021, titled Classification of children’s drawings strategies on touch-screen of seriation objects using a novel deep learning hybrid model. The article by Dzulfikri Pysal, Said Jadid Abdulkadir, Siti Rohkmah Mohd Shukri, and Hitham Alhussian is available on Science Direct. It concludes that a quantitative analysis of children’s drawing process from a computational system is both faster and more accurate than a qualitative human analysis.

So be it, but one should keep in mind that the study uses born-digital images. We would think that this gives the computer a head start over humans.

For methodological reasons, researchers who develop machine learning systems for drawing analysis often prefer when children draw on screen. Another case in point is a study by Seth Polsley, and four fellow scientists titled Detecting children’s fine motor skills development using machine learning, and published in 2022 in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (Issue 32). Here again, the original drawings are created on electronic devices for the study.

There are AI scientists who dare challenge computers to “look” at and analyze children’s drawings created on paper. Ochilbek Rakhmanov, Nwojo Nnanna Agwu, and Steve Adeshina, of the Nile University of Nigeria did just that, in a study titled Experimentation on hand drawn sketches by children to classify draw-a-person test Images in psychology. Their findings were presented at the 2020 33rd International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2020). It would be unfair to try and summarize their detailed article here. They sure deserve our respect for offering the only presentation, out of well over a hundred at that conference, to consider children’s drawings worthy of attention. The point is, it is nice to know that children’s drawings on paper can help research on machine learning.

One of the key challenges AI researchers face is the quality and size of data set they have access to. Researchers increasingly resort to online crowd sourcing to amass significant amount of data for their work. One of most accessible such initiative is QuickDraw, created by Jonas Jongejan, Henry Rowley, Takashi Kawashima, Jongmin Kim, and Nick Fox-Gieg, in collaboration with Google Creative Lab. This game invites anyone to help machine learning, simply by drawing on screen. According to Google, 15 M people have submitted 50 M images so far. The tech giant is transparent and upfront about making these images open source material for research.

Advancements into AI seem to already outpace human ability to keep up. Yet, we must try to grasp as much as possible its potential and impacts. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) holds its 11th Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2023) at Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), this week until November 9th.

Robot. By Léo Beaulieu, c1972. Source: CDIC-CIDE.

Feet in the sand

Summer settles in over the northern hemisphere, and many of us will have the chance to enjoy good times at the beach. Below is an image from our collection that depicts a family having such a good time, feet in the sand. Family times at the beach build lasting memories.

Did you know that making sandcastles can lead to a life of travels and even earnings? There are dozens of amateur and professional sandcastle competitions, mainly but not exclusively, in the United States and Canada. They also take place in the Netherlands, Spain, Japan, and in Australia. According to the Guinness World Records, the latest world record for the tallest sandcastle is currently held by the resort Skulpturparken Blokhus, in Denmark. It measured 21.16 meters and was made of over 6 tons of sand.

Find illustrated descriptions of festivals and competitions in the United States, in Susan LaBorde’s article on her Happy Beachcomber website. She is a dedicated beach enthusiast. The Hampton Beach Sand Sculpting Classic took place last week, and you can see what the masters crafted there by visiting their Facebook page. At ehCanada  you can see a calendar of this summer’s events in that country.

Sand has its own museum at the Sottori Sand Dunes in Japan. What an amazing place. See the good tips they give to encourage us to get right into the action of sand sculpting.

If you can’t make it to the beach, there are always imagination and… sandpaper to save the day. You can make amazing drawings using chalk or oil pastel on sandpaper. Stacey of Capturing Parenthood has all the sandpaper art tips for us. There is also much more to do artistically with sandpaper, as we found out from Jackie Myers’ article on the Art of Education University website.

I go to the beach. By Sahana, 2021. Source: CDIC-CIDE.

National Volunteer Week 2023

We join Volunteer Canada and all its affiliates in celebrating citizens who engage in volunteer activities around the world. Thank you to our current and past volunteers for their support and dedication in making our collection a reality.

We are actually looking for extra help on two of our standing committees this coming year, so please visit our committee mandates page and consider joining us, be it in person or virtually.

For the little ones, Volunteer Canada has this fun coloring page. Bring your colors to this week’s celebrations and share them for everyone to see you care.

In the ad below, a drawing from our collection made in 1970. It shows church goers all smiles on a bright sunny day, part of a religious class scrapbook.

Volunteer Week 2023. Sources: Volunteer Canada and CDIC-CIDE.

Ask about us at the HPL’s Locke Branch

Residents of the Kirkendall neighborhood in Hamilton (Canada) can now ask to browse our binder at their local public library branch on Locke street. It contains sample reproductions from our collection, ranging from the 1940s until now. Paper copies of our Contribution Form are also available on site, so families can add their own treasures at will. Locke street is the focal point of this friendly community, with small retail stores, good restaurants, busy cafés, and nearby schools.

We are glad to welcome the Hamilton Public Library in our Collection Partners Program. Other public and school libraries please feel free to inquire.

Locke Branch. Source: Hamilton Public Library.

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