Research in Action: Constructing Age for Young Readers

Children's literature studies has been relatively slow in adopting techniques from digital humanities. This article explains a method for digitising, annotating, and analysing texts in xml to investigate the implicit age norms that children's books convey. The case studies are seventeen books by Bart Moeyaert and La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman. The analysis of speech distribution, topic modelling, syntactic parsing, and lexical analysis with digital tools adds information about implicit age norms that can support and inspire narrative analyses with close reading.