Examining the Relationship Between the Violence in a Webcomic Episode and Violence in readers’ Comments with Computational Approaches

We examined how violent scenes and words used in action- and non-action-oriented webcomics were associated with the frequency by which violent words were used in readers’ online comments. Data on the webcomics provided by Naver, a popular webcomics provider, were analyzed with computational approaches. Primary results were as follows: there was a positive relationship between the number of violent words used in a webcomic and that of violent comments regardless of genre, and the effects of violent scenes on the number of violent comments were statistically insignificant regardless of the types of webcomics.