The Korean peninsula knows a long history of book culture, and attention to it has ranged from the earliest known texts to the recently growing interest in modern Korean literature that came with...Show moreThe Korean peninsula knows a long history of book culture, and attention to it has ranged from the earliest known texts to the recently growing interest in modern Korean literature that came with the ‘Korean wave’. Many of the now canonical works find their roots in the colonial era in Korea (1910-1945) and various aspects pertaining to textual production during this era have been researched by scholars. However, an often-overlooked history is that of the printers and printshops in colonial Korea who had a significant influence over book production. With this loss of primary source material directly stemming from these printshops, the only other source indicating the printer of a text is the included colophon. This colophon is often damaged or simply missing in older books, and to this date there is no efficient method to recover this lost information. Thereby preventing any sizeable quantitative study of printshops in colonial Korea. This MA Thesis will examine the possibility of using convolutional neural networks (ConvNet) to identify the printshop of a given text dating to colonial Korea in order to allow large- scale quantitative research into colonial Korean printshops, which has been impossible thus far It will do this through a case study approach that aims to successfully classify books of four colonial Korean printshops, namely, the Hansŏng Tosŏ Chusik Hoesa (漢城圖書株式會社), Taedong inswaeso (大東印刷所), Sinmungwan (新文館), and Chosŏn inswae chusik hoesa (朝鮮印刷株 式會社). The findings here can be applied to a more extensive set of printers, given enough data and time. Therefore, this research is of high importance to the field of Korean history, as it is an essential step in charting the history of colonial Korean printers. Additionally, the benefits gained from this study are also helpful in the field of digital humanities, as this study will not only focus on the production and performance of a model but also include dataset construction and model explainability. The latter is a vital part and often missing in other DH scholarly work related to ConvNets. Hence, this paper is highly relevant to Korean historical research, and its methodology can be used far beyond the context of colonial-era printshops.Show less
This thesis examines how the Korean state uses and distorts the memories of Colonial Korea in order to construct a national narrative of a victimized nation that was oppressed by the Japanese...Show moreThis thesis examines how the Korean state uses and distorts the memories of Colonial Korea in order to construct a national narrative of a victimized nation that was oppressed by the Japanese Empire and of a nation that engaged in a unified resistance against the Japanese Empire. This thesis argues that this national narrative is partially built upon ‘distorted’ colonial memories, as this narrative does not discuss the deep collaboration that occurred between the Japanese Empire and the Colonial Korean citizens. This thesis shall also argue that when one examines this case through the lens of the IR theory of constructivism and Takeo Hymans’ ‘politics of memory’ theory that this narrative is built with strong political motives that show the underlined political agenda that exists within the national identity building process. This thesis shall then show that these political motives are to distort or draw attention away from the involvement of the large number of Koreans that volunteered for the Japanese Imperial army and their actions to further Japanese imperialism within other parts of the Japanese Empire. It shall also highlight how the involvement of high-profile collaborators, such as Park Chung-Hee and Lt. General Hong Sa-ik, further distorts this narrative presented by the Korean state. Ultimately this thesis addresses the distortion that exists within the Korean-Japanese relations’ dichotomy and proposes that the only way for a meaningful dialogue between these two countries to exist is for both nations to acknowledge and discuss the distortions caused within their national narratives.Show less
This thesis examines in what way the modern South Korean National Identity is represented in contemporary Korean cinema that takes the colonial past as its subject. The Korean colonial past still...Show moreThis thesis examines in what way the modern South Korean National Identity is represented in contemporary Korean cinema that takes the colonial past as its subject. The Korean colonial past still is a sensitive and much discussed historical subject and modern film representations of this often present biased views. Cinema is taken to be a preeminent way of representing the past that not only tells us a lot about present-day views on a subject, but also influences these views. Firstly a theoretical framework is provided in which the importance of both modern-day national identity and the influence of cinema on this form of identity is discussed. In light of this framework six contemporary South Korean films are discussed with a division placed between male representations and female representations of national identity. Throughout this discussion it becomes clear that in an attempt to reshape the national identity and historical memory of Korea to a more positive one, these films place a heavy emphasis on the masculine spirit of the nation and often neglect to include female agency in the fight against Japan.Show less
