International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract—Recent surveys show that people’s enthusiasm for literary works has been waning gradually. Along this decline in reading habits, difficulties in remembering how to write certain characters are emerging, despite regular usage. To explore whether a novel form of literary appreciation can rekindle interest in literature, we refine our “character mosaics” method, which arranges thousands of adaptively scaled characters into motifs based on image brightness. Unlike traditional photographic mosaics, this ensures text readability while preserving the literary essence. In this study, we applied our method to 14 notable Japanese literary works, creating mosaic posters that maintain the original reading order of Japanese novels.

Keywords—character mosaics, novels, literary appreciation, text-based art, experiment

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Cite: Yuming Bai and Nobuyuki Umezu, "Fostering Interest and Enthusiasm in Literary Appreciation Through Character Mosaics," International Journal of Information and Education Technology, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 1103-1112, 2025.

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