FY2021 Annual Report for International Joint Research with Research Fund（様式）International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC),Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University
Date (year/mm/dd): 2022/04/22
1. Title of the Research Project
Development of contents processing methods for archiving “how to create” and “how to enjoy” towards comicsand animes
2. Research Leader
Name

Organization and title

Ryosuke Yamanishi

Associate Professor at Faculty of Informatics,
Kansai University, Japan

3. Co-researcher (Total： 9 persons)
Name

Organization and title

Susumu Nakata

Prof. at Dept. of Info. and Sci., Ritsumeikan University, JapanMitsunori
Matsushita

Prof. at Faculty of Informatics, Kansai University, Japan

Yoko Nishihara

Prof. at Dept. of Info. and Sci., Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Yoshihisa Fujita

Assist. Prof. at Dept. of Info. and Sci., Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Lieu-Hen Chen

Assoc. Prof. at National Chi Nan University, Taiwan

Wei-Ta Chu

Prof. at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

Takeshi Sakaki

R&D manager at Hottolink, Inc.

Hiroichiro Ishiwata

Auditor at Hottolink, Inc.

Takahiro Ozawa

Comic artist（様式）4. Overview of the Research Project (About 150 words) Note: If you have changed your project since the time ofapplication submission, please write clearly where you made changes.
This project aims to archive comics (i.e., mangas) and anime, known as one of the most famous and popular
Japanese cultures and industries, as digital data. The target is not only materials themself but also creators' skills,
unwritten knowledge, and experience to enjoy those entertainments.
To tackle this, we gather some computational approaches from different research fields. We develop fundamental
techniques for archiving storyline, drawing skills, and interface for retrieving such contents. The storyline is theessential point of comics and animes, and it is crucial to model the dynamics of the story and characters act in thestory to represent the story in a particular form. Drawing is now shifting from handwriting to 3D form in creating
animes. However, the attractiveness of handwriting drawing is still unrevealed, and the skills would be disappeared
without any mathematical modeling shortly. We mathematically model the handwriting drawing and try to figureout the attractiveness of Japanese legacy animes. After archiving the contents, we must need the interface to retrieve
them. We focus on the contents and how to enjoy them to develop the interface for the retrieval systems.
This research project is content-oriented for comics and animes. Every single subtask has a specific design forcomics and animes.

5. Overview of the Research Results Note: We may use this section for the Center’s PR.
We developed several methods designed for each target of archives: storyline (Fig.1) and drawing skills (Fig. 2.)
Also, we developed an interface for retrieving stories to avoid encountering spoilers.
We presented the results at domestic symposiums in Japan. Furthermore, some selected results were presented inreviewed international conferences and published as a reviewed journal paper. We have achieved one reviewed
journal paper, three reviewed international conference papers, and five domestic symposium papers.

Fig. 1 The storyline and active charactersat the point of the story.

Fig. 2 A method to feature the CG lines withhandwriting fluctuational features.

（様式）
6. Research Activities(1) Books(2) Articles
Japanese Language Listening Practice Support Using Dialogue Scenes of Anime with
Estimated Levels; June 2021; The Journal of the Society for Art and Science, Vol.20, No.2,
pp.108–119, Junjie Shan, Yoko Nishihara, Ryosuke Yamanishi, Akira Maeda; peer-reviewed
Support Interface for Retrieving Comic Contents using Characters’ Appearance Frequencies;
accepted; Journal of Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics, Yoko
Nishihara, Kaifeng Lei, and Ryosuke Yamanishi; peer-reviewed(3) Presentations[Reviewed Intl’ Conference]
Kodai Imaizumi, Ryosuke Yamanishi, Yoko Nishihara, and Takahiro Ozawa, Estimating Groups of Featured
Characters in Comics with Sequence of Characters’ Appearance, International Joint Workshop on Multimedia
Artworks Analysis and Attractiveness Computing in Multimedia 2021, 2021.
Yoko Nishihara, Jiaxiu Ma, Ryosuke Yamanishi, A Support Interface for Remembering Events in Novels byVisualizing Time-series Information of Characters and their Existing Places, HCI International 2021, pp.7687, 2021.
Ryosuke Yamanishi, Riona Mori, Mitsunori Matsushita: Representation of Characters’ Directed-relationships
in Comics with Speech-roles, Proc. of the 25th International Conference on Knowledge Based and Intelligent
Information and Engineering Systems, pp.1541-1549, 2021
[Domestic Conference] (in Japanese)
青山千泰，山西良典，吉田光男，石渡広一郎：SNS 上でシェアされる愛読者による漫画広告の基礎的な分析，芸術科学会全国大会 NICOGRAPH2021，2021
中島 楓華，山西 良典 ，巽 優人 ，藤田 宜久，仲田 晋 ：アニメキャラの顔パーツの位置バランスとキャラクタ属性の関係性に関する基礎検討，第 6 回コミック工学研究会，2021
宮川栞奈, 松下光範: 異なる作品間のキャラクタの関係を比較するための相関図可視化システム, 第 14回データ工学と情報マネジメントに関するフォーラム, F23-5, 2022.
樋口亮太，山西良典，松下光範：単語の頻度と意味に基づいたコミックに関するテキスト情報源の特性分
析，第 14 回データ工学と情報マネジメントに関するフォーラム，E21-2，2022
三橋 力綺，藤田 宜久，山西 良典，仲田 晋：CG 線画に手描き線の特徴を反映させる試み，第 7 回コミック工学研究会 pp.1-4, 2022
山西良典，西原陽子，松下光範：語彙の標本化と量子化によるあらすじの特性表現に関する基礎検討，
第 7 回コミック工学研究会，2022(4) Symposiums and/or research meeting you organized(5) Other research activities (Lectures to the general public, and appearances in/contributions to mass media)(6) Academic awards(7) Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research -KAKENHI(8) Competitive grants other than KAKENHI(9) Other achievements