Yoko Nishihara, Jiaxiu Ma, Ryosuke Yamanishi: A Support Interface for Remembering Events in Novels by Visualizing Time-series Information of Characters and their Existing Places, Proc. HCI International 2021, pp.76-87, 2021年7月

The style of reading books has shifted. People use electronic devices to read e-books. People often read books in a short time because it is difficult to have enough time for reading books at one time. If there is a time gap between readings, they may forget what has happened in the already read parts of books. Especially if people read novels where many characters appear, it is more difficult to remember what has happened for each character. Reading several stories in parallel should increase the number of rereads. The more times they reread books, the more difficult they enjoy reading. This paper proposes a support interface for remembering events in novels by visualizing time-series information of characters and their existing places. The proposed interface consists of two parts: (a) displaying of a novel text and (b) visualizing of time-series information of character names and their existing places. The proposed interface uses a historical chart as a metaphor for the visualization. If a novel text is given, the proposed interface extracts character names and places with the Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). The proposed interface sets the horizontal axis as the sentence’s number and the vertical axis as character names. The existing places are mapped as labeled dots on the plane given by the two axes. We experimented the proposed interface with participants and verified that the proposed interface could support them to remember events in novels.