The Text-Mining of Munhwa (Culture): The Case of a Popular Magazine in 1930s Korea

Abstract

Culture was an always “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 socio-political sense when they were forbidden to speak about politics. Starting in the 1920s especially, Koreans used culture to establish intellectual foundations of modernity, cultivate the masses’ aesthetic senses, and 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 socio-political actors, this article uses text-mining to explore the changing meanings of culture in a 1930s popular magazine. Run by the proponents of culture as a forefront of social movements, Samch’ŏlli (“Threethousand 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 the keywords that composed the theme of culture, and the semantic network of culture’s cooccurring words, we diachronically trace the polyphonic meanings of culture in different timeframes. 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 explained in previous studies, especially in its interplay with the various socio-political actors in launching collective projects by Korean intellectuals and the colonial government.