A New Way of Seeing: Using a Data Mining Approach to Understand Children's Views of Diversity and "Difference" in Picture Books

In 2011, the national news network CNN cosponsored a study regarding US children's perceptions of other children with a focus on variations of skin tones. This chapter describes the authors' research in which they used a methodology grounded in data mining to better understand the nature and tone of the comments from CNN's online audience on this story. It explores how those findings influenced further research on popular children's literature when they evaluated the topic of "difference". Particularly, the authors were interested in how the public would react to the news story in which a majority of children surveyed preferred a lighter skin tone and how the concept of "difference" is presented in popular children's literature in school libraries. Three major subject areas are involved in the research process: data mining, online news media, and children's literature.