Development and Evaluation of a Character Social Network Relationship Map Tool in an Ancient Book Digital Humanities Research Platform

This study aims to develop a character social network relationship map tool (CSNRMT) for supporting an ancient book digital humanities research platform to semi-automatically assist humanists through human-computer interaction in more efficiently and accurately exploring the character social network relationships from texts for useful research findings. With a quasi-experimental design, the experimental results reveal that the use of the ancient book digital humanities research platform with the CSNRMT appears higher effectiveness on the interpretation of characters and character social network relationships than the one without the CSNRMT, but does not achieve significantly statistical difference. Using the CSNRMT to interpret characters and character social network relationships presents remarkably higher technology acceptance of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use than the one without the CSNRMT. Furthermore, use behaviors analyzed by lag sequential analysis reveal that the CSNRMT could actually assist in the interpretation of character social network relationships. The interview results present positive opinions on the integration of system interface, the smoothness of operation, and the external search function. The CSNRMT developed in this study would be more practical when the offered information about character names and character social network relationships is more accurate and broad.