Page 189 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

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188 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.11, 2019

coupling network, which contains about 0.45 million nodes and 1.70 million edges, was derived
from the previous cross-time-space weighted people network.
The characteristics of the extracted two people social networks were investigated with social
network analysis. The results showed that the two networks were both small-world and scale-
free networks and have a clear community structure. Furthermore, three types of visual analysis
were also performed on the two people networks: point analysis was used to detect related persons
of a central person; chain analysis was used to discover the path between two persons (i.e. their
direct or indirect relationships); and network analysis was used to reveal high-central persons and
person communities in a specific historical or documental time-space. This also indicated that the
large-scale social networks extracted from online encyclopedia had great value to support digital
humanities research and improve researchers’ perception of historical person age in reality and
virtual characters in literary and artistic works.

The theoretical study on babies and toddlers’ reading programs in the United
States

FENG Jia 〇a ∗

Reading should start from the birth of a baby. American society emphasizes the importance of
reading to babies and toddlers since it lays a good foundation for their future reading and study.
At the same time, the leading role of public libraries is also strengthened in reaching such goals
in the United States. The reading programs towards babies and toddlers are participatory and
interactive educational activities embodied with various reading elements, aiming at improving
children’s comprehensive and healthy development in their early stage. The reading programs
focus on cultivating and strengthening children’s early development of literacy skills, enlarging
their syllables and vocabularies as much as possible, and preparing them for their preschool,
kindergarten and school life in the future. Considering the current usage, parents’ vital roles in
raising and cultivating children’s reading and learning habits, parents, as well as their children
aged 0 to 3, should be the audiences of babies and toddlers’ reading programs. Thus, American
public libraries encourage parents to do simple interactive activities with their children every day,
such as parent-child talking, singing, reading, writing and playing together. In addition, parent-
child reading activities vary in forms and contents and are designed based on children’s different
features with different ages, and the different age children cover from newborns, infants/babies,
toddlers to young children. All the children can enjoy their reading activities and cultivate life-long
learning interests. There are several babies and toddlers’ reading programs widely carried out in
the United States. Some common parts have been involved in all these interactive activities, such

* Correspondence should be addressed to FENG Jia, Email: 15221113734@163.com, ORCID: 0000-0002-8121-9447