The Text-Mining of Culture

Abstract

Culture was an “overloaded” concept during Korea’s colonial period. Like the ideas of literature and art, it was one of the main routes through which Koreans developed a sociopolitical sense when they were forbidden to speak about politics. Starting in the 1920s in particular, Koreans used culture to establish intellectual foundations of modernity, to cultivate the aesthetic sense of the masses, and to seriously engage with colonial reality. Furthermore, the idea of culture became more complicated in the late 1930s as the colonial government more aggressively employed the cultural idea to propagate a series of wars while mainlining Japan’s ascendency in East Asia. Reflecting upon such a conceptual tug of war by different sociopolitical actors, this chapter uses text-mining to explore the changing meaning of culture in a popular magazine from the 1930s. Run by proponents of culture as a forefront of social movements, Samch’ŏlli (lit. “three-thousand ri,” which figuratively refers to Korea) was a monthly magazine that lasted for more than a decade from 1929 to 1941, unlike many short-lived journals under censorship. By examining the frequency of occurrence of the keywords that composed the theme of culture and the semantic network of culture’s co-occurring words, we diachronically trace the polyphonic meanings of culture in different time frames. These quantitative and linguistic methods suggest that culture’s semantic network drawn from a 1930s periodical was far larger, more diverse in composition, and more influential than noted in previous studies, especially in its interplay with the various sociopolitical actors in launching collective projects by Korean intellectuals and the colonial government.