디지털 시대의 인문학에서 디지털 인문학 시대로: 한국문학에서 본 디지털 인문학 연구

Abstract

This paper aims to briefly trace the history of incorporating digital humanities in the field of modern literary studies in Korea. “Humanities in the digital age,” often seen in books published in the late 1990s and early 2000s, featured in various pieces of research that pertained to the rise of digital media. It also delved into its impact on textual composition, narrative structure, and ways of reading. Digital archiving, informatics, and analyses of hyper-texts and computer games emerged separately in different academic domains. Yet, those individual outcomes started being merged and rearranged under the banner of digital humanities around 2014 to 2016 and onward,with both the new development and re-adaptation of quantitative methods, such as network analysis, text-mining, distant reading, and more. This paper will look into the major figures and academic institutions that led such a digital turn in Korea and examine their toils and struggles. It also proposes a few suggestions for the full-fledged development of a new academic field in the future. This attempt, I hope, reveals an underexplored history in the research of modern Korean literature and more than anything, the history of receiving digital methods in humanities in general.