2022 Volume 34 Issue 3 Pages 612-618
People often want to re-read the comic scenes where a character first appears and where a character plays actively. They can use a search engine like Google to find where the scene is. The search results often include information about unrelated parts, which might reduce their enjoyment of comics. There are not useful search engines for comic content retrieval. We assume that people can recall a comic scene by looking at the information about characters’ appearance frequencies if they have already read the part of the comic. This paper proposes a support interface for comic content retrieval that visualizes the information of characters’ appearance frequencies. Characters’ appearance frequencies are counted up by the number of characters’ speech lines. The frequencies are visualized with a stacked area graph. The visualized information supports users in comic content retrieval. The authors conducted evaluation experiments. The authors asked experimental participants to read comics and answer the questions about comic contents designed by the authors. The participants were divided into two groups: an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group used the proposed interface in answering questions while the control group used a search engine. The authors compared the correct rates between the two groups. The correct rate of the experimental group was 81% while that of the control group was 67%. Statistical test results indicated that the proposed interface could support the retrieval of scenes where a character plays actively without explicitly indicating the comic content.
