Critical Content Analysis of Visual Images in Books for Young People ed. by Holly Johnson, Janelle Mathis, Kathy G. Short (review)
- Critical Content Analysis of Visual Images in Books for Young People ed. by Holly Johnson, Janelle Mathis, Kathy G. Short
CRITICAL CONTENT ANALYSIS OF VISUAL IMAGES IN BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. Reading Images. Edited by Holly Johnson, Janelle Mathis, and Kathy G. Short. Routledge, 2019, 288 pages. ISBN: 978-1-138-38706-5
Editors and contributors Holly Johnson, Janelle Mathis, and Kathy Short have been working in the field of critical content analysis for several years. Whereas their 2016 book, Critical Content Analysis of Children's and Young Adult Literature: Reframing Perspective, featured articles on children's literature in general, their new edited volume specifically focuses on the analysis of visual images in books for young readers, namely in picturebooks and graphic novels. Geared toward researchers, educators, and students, this academic collection gathers a variety of essays that provide interesting insight into a wide range of critical lenses and will be useful to anyone who is interested in interpreting visual images—be it in literature or in real life—to find the right tools and procedures.
The book, which is divided into five parts, starts with a thorough section on the research methodology and the analytical tools the various contributors used.
In the opening chapter, Kathy Short first offers a definition of the general term content analysis as "an umbrella term used to indicate different research methods for analyzing texts and describing and interpreting the written artifacts of a society" (4). She explains the specifics of critical content analysis: "[T]he researcher uses a specific critical lens as the frame from which to develop the research questions, select texts, analyze the data, and reflect on findings" (5). Over the following sixteen pages, she then provides a detailed description of the step-by-step process the researchers of this book followed for the examination of visual images.
In this introductory chapter, Short stresses the great flexibility of critical content analysis, which allows scholars a wide range of viewpoints to choose from, depending on their specific research purpose.
In chapter 2, Australian researcher Clare Painter, coauthor of a 2013 book about image analysis of children's picturebooks, provides a short introduction to the theoretical framework employed by all the contributors: systemic-functional semiotics. In particular, she introduces the three functions—ideational, interpersonal, and textual—that every text fulfills, and delineates the various visual meaning systems and their visual realizations in (verbal and) visual texts.
Parts II through IV constitute the main part of the book, with twelve different chapters exploring a wide range of texts and research questions.
Part II gathers four studies on "Visual Images in Counter-Narratives" that share a number of aspects but focus on different cultures and employ different lenses for their analyses. Desiree Cueto and Wanda M. Brooks in chapter 3 use the research question "How do Black illustrators address antiblackness through their portrayals of Black children?" (44) as a guideline for their analysis of four picturebooks published between 1998 and 2017 through the lens of Critical Race Theory and BlackCrit theory. In chapter 4, Janine M. Schall, Julia López-Robertson, and [End Page 112] Jeanne G. Fain employ Critical Race Theory and LatCrit theory and focus on "the centrality of experiential knowledge" when examining three picturebooks telling immigrant stories of Latinx characters. In chapters 5 and 6, the respective authors provide an in-depth analysis of one picturebook each: Angeline P. Hoffman concentrates on the influences of Apache culture on the visual symbolism in Antelope Woman (1992), and Janelle Mathis enquires how interpretative play empowers children in Niño Wrestles the World and how it gives them a sense of agency and identity.
The three essays in part III, though grouped under the heading of "Visual Images and Positioning," are very different as to their scope and the themes they tackle. Holly Johnson's "The Power of a Gaze" (chapter 7) looks at how a character's gaze positions the readers and divides a large corpus of fifty...
