Understanding Users of Cross-media Information: Contexts, motivations, and information features focusing on visual narrative materials

Abstract

Librarians and information experts play key roles in facilitating access to multimedia objects, and the importance of their expertise has increased with the growth of digital libraries. Existing studies show, however, that current information systems—including online databases, library catalogs, and recommendation services—do not fully meet the needs of multimedia information users. This study contributes to improving multimedia access by focusing on three different types of visual narrative materials and their users: printed visual narrative (e.g., comic books, graphic novels, manga, newspaper comic strips), visual narrative with a moving image format (e.g., animated films, anime, TV cartoons), and interactive visual narrative (e.g., video games). The objective of this study is to understand users of different types of visual narrative materials through a two-pronged approach: a diary study complemented by a follow-up interview, and a larger-scale content analysis of natural language queries collected from online fan communities. The researcher addresses three main themes in this dissertation: 1) the motivations, context, and situational information of users who consume visual narrative materials, 2) essential information features for the users to find relevant visual narrative materials, and 3) relationships among the motivations, contexts, and information features, if any. By better identifying and understanding users of visual materials, the contributions may improve recommendations and reference services for multimedia materials, encourage media trans-literacy, and serve as a foundation for developing enhanced organization and retrieval systems for multimedia information. Specifically, this work provided recommendations for cross-media advisory services in libraries. By introducing patrons to relevant materials in different formats, librarians and reference service providers will provide those patrons options that they may not have explored yet, and will promote usage of potentially under-utilized media collections in libraries. In addition, providing a rich narrative of users’ information seeking needs and media consumption behavior will help current information systems provide enhanced search experiences to users.