영문초록 Abstract

[ABSTRACT]

Developing a Digital Archive and Curation Model for Historical Documents: Focusing on the National Debt Redemption Movement in Korea

• Kim Ji-myung

Major in Cultural Informatics, The Graduate School of Korean Studies, The Academy of Korean Studies

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a digital curation model for historical documents, focusing on the records of the National Debt Redemption Movement of Korea. To accomplish this, the primary objective was to collect data on events and persons from the records, and build a semantic database in which the relational information between these data is embedded. It was confirmed that new story themes for historical narratives that could not be found from the assemblage of individual data were discovered through the semantic database. This study developed a data-based historical representation model, which presents a new paradigm of digital curation.

The target documents for research were those records related to the National Debt Redemption Movement which took place in Daegu, Korea, in 1907. The Movement, a voluntary fund-raising campaign by the people, is an unprecedented example in world history. The process of initiating and implementing the movement was well documented in the form of hand-written civilian documents and press reports. These documents were listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World in November 2017.

This study draws upon the historical narrative theory by Hayden White in designing an integrated semantic archive, to discover story themes for narratives for history representation. White’s theory rejects the traditional claim that professional historians can discover the “truth” from history and show “as is.” He argues that historical events are delivered as “narratives” after being interpreted and created as linguistic and cultural artifacts of the narrator.

To implement the White’s theory of historical narratives, this study applied the “Encyves Model,” proposed by Kim Hyeon. This model, with its name coined by combining "encyclopedia" and "archive," connects knowledge data contained within archival materials. The Encyves Model enables finding semantically related data through the network of data, in accordance with their context, regardless of the data’s original format – whether it is an artifact, book, or an original document.

The significance of this study can be summarized as follows.

First, the scope of time and space in the research on building the National Debt Redemption Movement archives was expanded. It was confirmed that six new story themes could be discovered by constructing a semantic database. Based on this story”theme, a new paradigm of a curation model was proposed which is proven to be effective in representing historical events.

Secondly, in the process of extracting data from the historical records, this study tried to avoid slanting towards specific values or ideologies. The issue of criteria for archiving and curation may inevitably arise, but the study presented inclusiveness in scope going beyond ideological inclinations in data archiving.

Finally, while the interpretative texts of historical events tended to be confined to those directly related data, the semantic archive in this study included environmental and contextual data concerned with the overall situation.

As the records related to National Debt Redemption Movement have been listed as a Memory of the World of UNESCO, there is heightened interest across the world. The records need to be compatible with and linked to an open data network to provide knowledge resources to scholars, creative artists, and the general public.

By adopting the Encyves Model, the structure and relations terminology of the database already adheres to international standards. Presenting the expression of the nodes – a core data element – in an appropriate English equivalent remains a task to further expedite utilization of the National Debt Redemption Movement archive.

• Keywords:

Digital Archives, Digital Curation, Ontology, Semantic Data, Historical Narratives, Digital Heritage, Digital Humanities, National Debt Redemption Movement, Encyves