For my individual project titled, “The Adventures of Caribbean Children’s Literature”, I would like to focus on storybooks published by Caribbean authors. As a child, our shelves contained numerous books, however, what percentage of these books were written by Caribbean authors? Our region is filled with rich literature, yet, they aren’t as popular as international literary work. This idea began during the initial discussion of the Create Caribbean interns individual project with Dr Esprit. I quickly began to reminisce about my younger days when I used to read fairytales such as Snow White and Cinderella. They never sparked my interest as much as a short story collection of Dominica folklore I obtained from my brother’s bookshelf. While researching the genres of various books in our group’s project, Visualising Caribbean Literary Encounters, I realised that there were very few children’s literary works. The aim of this project is to research and study the most published genres from 1980-202 in countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. During this project, I will also be researching various Caribbean authors within these countries, with ties to children’s literature as well as the books produced by them. I will be asking myself questions such as, “Which genre was mostly published per country?” and “What was the author’s main intent when they published the books in these genres?” This project could be implemented in two ways, that is through storytelling and a digital exhibit, however, I chose to use the storytelling tool, Twine.

For my storytelling exploration, my project will target children’s literature written by Caribbean authors from the year 1980-2020. I will be making use of tools such as Zotero, a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect and organize data, and Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. For each book I will highlight the publication year, title, author, author country, illustrator, translator, ISBN, genre, description, number of pages, publisher, publisher city, country, and language using sites like WorldCat and Google Books. Genres such as anthologies, autobiographies, biographies, novels, folklores, memoirs, nonfiction books, poetry and short stories will be used to categorize the books.

The information will be collected in Zotero and organised using Google Sheets. After all my information is on the sheets, I will separate the books by country and create web apps using Google Apps Scripts. I will then input all of my information into Twine. By using the story format, Harlowe, I will have an easier approach to my project. There will be a separate page for each country and the books found. It will also show an external link to the HTML web app I created to display the table of all the books of that specific country. The book’s page will show its information, a picture of the book cover and a link to my conclusion. Available pictures of each book will be sourced online from the same resources I obtained the book’s information. My conclusion will contain my answer to my questions and a reflection on my study of the individual project.