IIIF for Educators

Soviet Children's Books

click to copy lesson html Students are introduced to the practice of "Ekphrasis" to practice "reading" an image/photograph.

Soviet Children’s Books

💡 Concept

Cover design for book "The Pedagogy of Images"

Poster for The Pedagogy of Images events

In the 1920s, with the end of the revolution, the Soviet government began investing resources and energy into creating a new type of book for the first generation of young Soviet readers. In a sense, these early books for children were the ABCs of Soviet modernity; creatively illustrated and intricately designed, they were manuals and primers that helped the young reader enter the field of politics through literature. Children’s books provided the basic vocabulary and grammar for understanding new, post-revolutionary realities, but they also taught young readers how to perceive modern events and communist practices. </div>

Relying on a process of dual-media rendering, illustrated books presented propaganda as a simple, repeatable narrative or verse, while also casting it in easily recognizable graphic images. A vehicle of ideology, object of affection, and product of labour all in one, the illustrated book for the young Soviet reader emerged as an important cultural phenomenon. Communist in its content, it was often avant-gardist in its form.
Spotlighting three thematic threads – communist goals, pedagogy, and propaganda – The Pedagogy of Images traces the formation of a mass-modern readership through the creation of the communist-inflected visual and narrative conventions that these early readers were meant to appropriate.

🖥️ Activity

In this activity, we will use selections from the Lloyd E. Cotsen Library of Children's Books at Princeton University (the object and product of a series of events and an AATSEEL award-winning publication) as material for detail cropping, comparative analysis, and AI chat. The materials are sourced below in the IIIF "Mixtape" tool, which has viewing and cropping tools built in. In the Tools section below that is an OpenAI powered crop & chat tool. We will demonstrate in session, and you are encouraged to conduct a chat and submit posts with your results. 

👓 Examples

Items in our Mixtape teaching collection are sourced from:

🧱 Materials

 

🛠️ Tools

 

✉️ Share

Please use the reply to post:

  • any sample image detail crops you made (with any commentary you would like to add)
  • the transcript of a dialog with the AI tool (also, with any commentary)

🤝 Collaborate

Please take a moment to review posts by others, and feel free to reply with a comment:

  • what did they discover that you might not have noticed?
  • how could you imagine using this for instruction and/or research?

 

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