The role of empirical methods in investigating readers’ constructions of authorial creativity in literary reading

The popularity of literary biographies and the importance publishers place on author publicity materials suggest the concept of an author’s creative intentions is important to readers’ appreciation of literary works. However, the question of how this kind of contextual information informs literary interpretation is contentious. One area of dispute concerns the extent to which readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions are text-centred and therefore can adequately be understood by linguistic evidence alone. The current study shows how the relationship between linguistic and contextual factors in readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions may be investigated empirically. We use eye-tracking to determine whether readers’ responses to textual features (changes to lexis and punctuation) are affected by prior, extra-textual prompts concerning information about an author’s creative intentions. We showed participants pairs of sentences from Oscar Wilde and Henry James while monitoring their eye movements. The first sentence was followed by a prompt denoting a different attribution (Authorial, Editorial/Publisher and Typographic) for the change that, if present, would appear in the second sentence. After reading the second sentence, participants were asked whether they had detected a change and, if so, to describe it. If the concept of an author’s creative intentions is implicated in literary reading this should influence participants’ reading behaviour and ability to accurately report a change based on the prompt. The findings showed that readers’ noticing of textual variants was sensitive to the prior prompt about its authorship, in the sense of producing an effect on attention and re-reading times. But they also showed that these effects did not follow the pattern predicted of them, based on prior assumptions about readers’ cultures. This last finding points to the importance, as well as the challenges, of further investigating the role of contextual information in readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions.

Studying anti-Semitism using primary sources in graphic novels

Recent trends in history education have emphasized the study of primary sources as an important conduit for fostering critical and historical thinking skills and for allowing students to assume the role of historians. In the following article, I examine the ways that Nora Krug’s Belonging, Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s Anne Frank’s Diary and Will Eisner’s The Plot, all meaningfully engage with primary sources as a central feature of the graphic novel. Each of the texts addresses a different aspect of historical anti-Semitism but through the use of visual and textual devices that are woven into the primary sources, connections to contemporary society abound. Furthermore, what also emerges with these three texts is an active engagement with the reader wherein the primary sources are used to demand that the reader thinks about historical and contemporary anti-Semitism. Therefore, these three texts do not simply include primary sources but, like effective history educators, they model and foster critical and historical thinking through the visual and textual prompts. Their inclusion turns the reader into an active historian who participates in the process of discovery and arrives at their own understanding of the perniciousness of anti-Semitism throughout history and its continued presence in their own communities.

Studying anti-Semitism using primary sources in graphic novels

Recent trends in history education have emphasized the study of primary sources as an important conduit for fostering critical and historical thinking skills and for allowing students to assume the role of historians. In the following article, I examine the ways that Nora Krug’s Belonging, Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s Anne Frank’s Diary and Will Eisner’s The Plot, all meaningfully engage with primary sources as a central feature of the graphic novel. Each of the texts addresses a different aspect of historical anti-Semitism but through the use of visual and textual devices that are woven into the primary sources, connections to contemporary society abound. Furthermore, what also emerges with these three texts is an active engagement with the reader wherein the primary sources are used to demand that the reader thinks about historical and contemporary anti-Semitism. Therefore, these three texts do not simply include primary sources but, like effective history educators, they model and foster critical and historical thinking through the visual and textual prompts. Their inclusion turns the reader into an active historian who participates in the process of discovery and arrives at their own understanding of the perniciousness of anti-Semitism throughout history and its continued presence in their own communities.

Using a Textual Prompt to Teach Multiword Requesting to Two Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by social and communication impairment, but some children appear to have relative strength in areas such as reading printed words. The present study involved two children with limited expressive communication skills, but relatively stronger reading ability. Based on this existing strength, we evaluated a textual prompting procedure for teaching the children to produce multiword spoken requests. The effect of providing textual prompts on production of multiword requests was evaluated in an ABAB design. The results showed that multiword requests increased when textual prompts were provided and decreased when the prompts were removed. In subsequent phases, the textual prompts were successfully faded by gradually making the printed text lighter and lighter until eventually the prompts were eliminated altogether. We conclude that identification of children’s strengths may assist in identifying effective prompting procedures that could then be used in teaching functional communication skills.

Assessing the visual Q method online research tool: A usability, reliability, and methods agreement analysis

The traditional paper-based Q method was introduced to the social sciences in the 1930s. However, despite its unique capability for measuring peoples’ subjective opinions, the method has not been broadly employed by researchers. Moreover, despite recent efforts to administer the Q method surveys via the Internet, they have been mostly limited to the usage of textual prompts. Besides, there is no concrete evidence on the usability, reliability, and agreement analysis between the online Q method research tools and the traditional paper-based Q method. Therefore, the visual Q method online research tool was developed to resolve these deficiencies and add new dimensions (audio and video) to the Q method research. The development of the visual Q method platform was a three-stage process that commenced with a usability test on 31 visitors to a local museum. Second, a test–retest reliability analysis with a convenient sample of 37 students resulted in a high reliability coefficient superior to that of the traditional paper-based Q method. Third, the analysis of agreement between the visual Q method and the traditional paper-based Q method on a sample of 10 students revealed substantial similarities between their generated (V)Q sorts. Overall, the study findings provide substantial evidence on the usability and rigor of the visual Q method online research tool.