The international circulation of children’s literature, particularly illustrated non-fiction, remains a comparatively underexamined area within translation studies, publishing research, and digital humanities (Van Coillie and McMartin 2020). While a growing body of work has mapped global translation flows for adult fiction and literary prestige markets, far less attention has been paid to genres in which multimodality, educational intent, and market mediation play a central role. This paper addresses this gap by examining the global dissemination of Czech illustrated non-fiction books for children through a data-driven study grounded in close collaboration between academic research and publishing practice. By engaging directly with a major children’s publisher as both data provider and interpretive partner, the study situates computational analysis within ongoing professional expertise, rather than treating it as an external or purely technical intervention.

The study draws on a unique, publisher-provided dataset documenting international licensing activity between 2014 and 2024. The dataset comprises 3,436 licences sold, corresponding to 651 distinct titles and 53 target languages. In addition to licensing records, the corpus includes enriched bibliographic metadata, full-text PDF files of the illustrated books, and internal data on publisher enquiries and negotiations. This combination of textual, visual, and transactional data enables the analysis of dissemination not merely as a count of translated titles, but as a multi-stage process involving selection, evaluation, negotiation, and market-specific adaptation. Methodologically, the study adopts a bibliographic data science perspective (Lahti et al. 2019), treating enriched bibliographic and publishing records as primary empirical material rather than as ancillary description.

Drawing on insights from publishing studies and the sociology of translation (Heilbron and Sapiro 2007; Sapiro 2008; 2015; 2016; Franssen and Kuipers 2013; Thompson 2012), the paper conceptualises the publisher as a central gatekeeping actor operating under conditions of uncertainty. In this context, Albatros has articulated several recurring intuitions regarding international dissemination: that different regional gatekeepers operate with distinct expectations; that tensions may arise between the intended age of the child reader and the perceived aesthetic appeal of illustrated non-fiction; and that broad regional contrasts persis t as to didactic framing, textual density, emotional engagement and visual aesthetics. Rather than treating these observations as anecdotal explanations, the paper seeks to operationalise and critically examine them through computational analysis.

The overarching research question guiding the study is: What patterns exist in the global dissemination of Czech illustrated non-fiction books for children? This question is further specified through four interrelated research questions: (1) how are licensing flows structured in terms of target languages, regions, and markets; (2) how do publisher enquiries and licensing decisions mediate between potential and realised dissemination; (3) how do target age categories, educational framing, and aesthetic strategies interact in shaping international circulation; and (4) to what extent do textual and visual characteristics of illustrated non-fiction correlate with dissemination patterns across regions. While all four questions frame the analytical agenda, the paper acknowledges that the third and fourth questions can only be addressed in a preliminary and exploratory manner at this stage.

Methodologically, the paper develops a multidimensional book profiling framework that integrates bibliographic, physical, textual, visual, and transactional features. Core features include bibliographic metadata, target age group classifications, topical categories (distinguishing between bibliographic and marketing-based framings), target languages and regions, and data on editor enquiries, and licensing outcomes. These dimensions form the primary analytical basis for modelling dissemination patterns. In addition, the study experiments with a set of exploratory computational metrics derived from full-text and visual data, including readability and lexical complexity measures, and image–text ratios. These exploratory features are treated as proxies rather than definitive indicators and are used cautiously to assess their potential analytical value rather than to draw conclusive claims.

The resulting book profiles are analysed using clustering techniques to identify recurrent patterns in how different types of illustrated non-fiction circulate internationally. Rather than predicting success or failure, clustering is employed to detect typologies of dissemination that emerge from the interaction between book characteristics, publisher mediation, and target markets. This approach aligns with recent work that emphasises connectivity and relationality in translation and publishing decisions (Vimr 2023; Cantó-Milà et al. 2025), while remaining sensitive to the limitations of computational abstraction in the analysis of cultural artefacts.

The findings presented in the paper are explicitly framed as preliminary. Nevertheless, they indicate several emerging tendencies: apparent asymmetries in dissemination across languages and regions; strong concentration effects in a limited number of markets; and systematic differences in the types of illustrated non-fiction that circulate in different geopolitical and cultural contexts. Initial results suggest that some of the publisher’s intuitions can be observed as patterned tendencies in the data.

By combining close collaboration with a major publishing house, mid-scale licensing data, and cautious computational analysis of bibliographic, textual, and visual features, the paper contributes both substantively and methodologically to digital humanities research on translation and publishing. It foregrounds children’s illustrated non-fiction as a globally circulating cultural domain shaped by specific market and aesthetic dynamics. It demonstrates how publisher knowledge can be translated into operational research questions and computational profiles without reducing complex editorial judgments to anecdotal explanation. Beyond the Czech case, the study proposes a transferable framework for analysing global dissemination processes at the intersection of bibliographic data science, publishing studies, and digital humanities.