Adding semantics to comics using a crowdsourcing approach

With over 85 million print units sold last year only for the top 300 comic book titles, the comics industry is reaching a new high for the first time since 2007 (before the economical crisis). And this excludes the increasingly popular graphic novels or the increasingly more accessible digital comics. Digital comics however find themselves at a point where the difficulty of producing high quality content is directly related to the lack of semantic information linked to it. In this short paper, we propose a crowdsourcing approach for annotating comic books for the purpose of producing XML-based encodings to assist publishers, researchers or collection curators