Panel Transitions for Genre Analysis in Visual Narratives

Understanding how humans communicate and perceive narratives is important for media technology research and development. This is particularly important in current times when there are tools and algorithms that are easily available for amateur users to create high-quality content. Narrative media develops over time a set of recognizable patterns of features across similar artifacts. Genre is one such grouping of artifacts for narrative media with similar patterns, tropes, and story structures. While much work has been done on genre-based classifications in text and video, we present a novel approach to do a multi-modal analysis of genre based on comics and manga-style visual narratives. We present a systematic feature analysis of an annotated dataset that includes a variety of western and eastern visual books with annotations for high-level narrative patterns. We then present a detailed analysis of the contributions of high-level features to genre classification for this medium. We highlight some of the limitations and challenges of our existing computational approaches in modeling subjective labels. Our contributions to the community are: a dataset of annotated manga books, a multi-modal analysis of visual panels and text in a constrained and popular medium through high-level features, and a systematic process for incorporating subjective narrative patterns in computational models.