This quantitative study was conducted to tackle the absence of quantitative research into socialist thought within nationalist press in the 1920s. Leftist nationalist thought has been marginalised...Show moreThis quantitative study was conducted to tackle the absence of quantitative research into socialist thought within nationalist press in the 1920s. Leftist nationalist thought has been marginalised ever since the U.S. occupation of the Southern regions of the Korean Peninsula. The repression of leftist thought that the U.S. instigated continued in the South Korean state in the spirit of the Cold War and was consequently ignored by many scholars of Korea. It was after bans on leftist literature were lifted in 1988 that it sparked renewed interest by scholars. While recently more works surrounding leftist culture have been produced, studies examining the growth of socialism as political thought within the 1920s remain scarce. The development of nationalist groups in this period is important as here lie the foundations for leftist ideologies that played a major role in the division of the Korean Peninsula. Furthermore, leftist culture still remains stigmatised within South Korea today and the importance of it has yet to be fully recognised. During the first ten years of the colonisation of the Korean Peninsula (1910-1945) the Korean populace dealt with harsh repression of nationalist sentiment. After the nationalist uprisings on March 1st 1919, it became clear to the Japanese that change was needed. This coincided with the more liberal Taisho era in Japan proper and prompted a change of leadership in the colony. With the arrival of governor-general Saitō Makoto, a more liberal period in the colony was ushered in and among many changes, indigenous press was allowed under watch of colonial government. Immediately after the allowance of press, newspapers and monthly magazines produced by Koreans developed rapidly. It was within this colonial setting that a unique public sphere emerged in which, for a brief period, critical dialogue between nationalist and the colonial government was able to occur. Nationalists quickly made use of this newfound freedom. Two nationalist ideologies began playing a major role within this public sphere: cultural nationalists and socialists. Cultural nationalists advocated the construction of a new culture, which was the necessary basis for an independent Korean nation. They favoured long-term cultural ventures that would aid with the creation of a new culture and prepare Koreans for becoming independent. In contrast, socialists proposed other ideas for the way to independence in the form of Marxist ideas, often on a short term basis. Socialist authors took a critical stance towards cultural nationalists, they criticised the elitist nature of their plans and in later years even accused them of accommodationism. While dialogue between these nationalist groups occurred throughout much of the press, the dialogue within the monthly magazine Kaebyŏk (開闢) is of interest. Kaebyŏk became the most prominent and longest running magazine of the 1920s. Publishing a total of 2447 articles from its inception in 1920 until its ban by the colonial government in 1926, Kaebyŏk has often designated as the centre for cultural nationalist thought, and while authors have highlighted that socialist published within Kaebyŏk too, there are often conflicting claims as to how significant it was. This leaves a gap in our understanding of the importance of socialism within Kaebyŏk. New developments into computational approaches for the humanities expanded and became known collectively as the ‘Digital Humanities’. Approaches within this subfield offer new opportunities that were previously unachievable; through the use of computational approaches, a distant reading of large numbers of texts is possible within a small amount of time. Scholars have already begun to tap into the possibilities that this brings, but most research that is being done focuses on western historical documents and corpuses. This is due to two reasons: the availability of digitised western texts greatly outweighs counterparts and many of the tools available to conduct such research are based on western languages (mostly English). Research into other fields such as Korean studies is rising, yet groundwork for approaches easily applicable to western texts is still being laid by DH scholars. Scholars engaging in the question of the development of socialism in the 1920s have generally done so through qualitative research, bringing into focus the contents of the text. While this provides important insights into the texts and ideologies itself, it offers limited understanding of the larger trends that occurred within Kaebyŏk and the growth of socialist thought. Through the use of the aforementioned new computational approaches, this study aims to fill this gap by answering the question: How did the numerical volume of socialist publications within Kaebyŏk develop quantitively throughout its lifetime? By reducing the development of socialist thought to a numerical approach, we put in focus the larger trends of this development, but through doing so forfeit gaining new insights into the qualitative content of the texts. To achieve this, the study makes use of a method called topic modelling, which tries to disseminate ‘topics’ from a set of documents. These ‘topics’ show as result a word cluster that needs interpretation of a human actor. To achieve this on Kaebyŏk, we will make us of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm in conjunction with gibbs sampling. By examining the produced topics and linking these to what is known about both socialism and cultural nationals articles can be tagged. A total of two topics that represent cultural nationalist ideology were found, and three that represent socialist ideology. We then examined the composition of articles and tagged these based on the found topics to produce a bar chart showing the amount of socialist and cultural nationalist articles per published issue of Kaebyŏk. The findings of this study show the prominence of socialist articles within Kaebyŏk. With initial growth in December 1922 and a small decline, we can see a resurgence of socialist articles in September 1923, whereafter they become the most present ideology when compared to cultural nationalism. Socialist articles remained present in significant numbers until the very last publication of Kaebyŏk in August 1926. Cultural nationalist articles declined sharply after September 1923, and only occasionally appeared in small numbers. This study confirms assertions by qualitative studies from Robinson (1988) that socialist influence was noticeable and Park (2015) that socialist intellectuals used Kaebyŏk as an outlet too. However, this study breaks from the expected pattern of the decline of socialist articles after the enactment of the peace preservation law and prohibition of publication for two months. None of these measures seem to have had significant effect on the amount of publications of socialist articles when compared to the period between September 1923 and the enactment of the peace preservation law. This provides evidence for the claim that the peace preservation law only became actively enforced after 1927. Additionally this study adds to the field of digital humanities by showing the possibility of using the KoNLPy package, alongside manual additions to stop-word lists, to gain useable data from older Korean texts. Furthermore, it employed the PyLDAvis package to examine the produced topic model in a more intuitive manner than the command line. It also allows for easy distribution of the results. Lastly, this thesis aims to show the possibilities that lie within cooperation between quantitive studies and qualitative studies. Without the previously conducted close readings and studies produced through this, this research would have been impossible.Show less
