ComiQA: A Comic Question-Answer Sharing System that Helps Users to Recollect the Content of Previous Volumes

It takes several months or years to release a new volume of a comic book after the previous volume. Therefore, when reading a long-awaited newest volume of a comic, it is sometimes difficult to recollect and understand the flow of the story, causing the readers to reread the previous volume or reread from the first volume to check the story. Re-reading can be fun when there is enough time. However, when there are many volumes of the comic or the time is limited, the reader will want to recollect the previous content as soon as possible to read the newest volume. One way to recollect the previous content quickly is to check its summary. However, a synopsis is often not enough to recollect everything and may become a spoiler if the reader has forgotten to read the previous volume. In this paper, we proposed and implemented a system that enables users to recollect the content of the previous volume by quizzes (question-answer pairs). We considered that just reading a question text would not be a spoiler. In addition, we released our system, “ComiQA,” as a Web service and found the characteristics of quizzes made by analyzing the registered 1465 quizzes in our service. We also experimented to investigate and compare the degree of recollection of creating quizzes and writing reviews. We found that creating quizzes helps people recollect the episodes more effectively than writing reviews, and viewing the quiz leads to further recollection.