New publication out: Reading an app

My newest article, Reading an app: Dimensions of meaning-making in digital literary reading in early childhood, has just been published in a bilingual edition of the journal Perspectiva. It discusses some important aspects of my PhD thesis, on young children shared reading of literary apps. The article is available to all as the journal is Open Access.

Check the abstract:

The format of the literary app allowed the development of a new type of digital literature that gained special prominence in the production of digital texts for children. This article aims to discuss digital reading in early childhood from the empirical analysis of reading events involving children and their parents engaged with literary apps. In a qualitative study, the shared reading of literary apps was observed and analyzed according to the theoretical and methodological framework of multimodal social semiotics, in dialogue with interdisciplinary theoretical discussions about embodiment, affect and agency. Both the readers’ responses and the textual characteristics of the literature in app format were taken into account in the analysis of the meaning transactions occurred between child, parent(s) and literary text. The study points out three key dimensions in the reading of literary apps in childhood: (1) embodiment -the reader’s body plays an essential role in the construction of meaning and in the phenomenological experience of digital reading; (2) affect -the reader exchanges, within the fictional world that they temporarily inhabit, intensities and emotions with fictional elements, such as characters, and with their parents; (3) agency -readers have agency to negotiate their participation and meaning-making in reading, in spite of design limitations, and expresses their agency through performance and subversion.