As one of the traditional branches of hanmun prose, the biography (jeon, 傳) is characterized by taking as its topic an individual's daily life or one partial aspect of their life. The biography, when seen as a text which focuses on the life and rela...
As one of the traditional branches of hanmun prose, the biography (jeon, 傳) is characterized by taking as its topic an individual's daily life or one partial aspect of their life. The biography, when seen as a text which focuses on the life and related details of a real person, is not just one literary genre among many, but has the clear potential to be consid-ered as a historical resource.
With this perspective in mind, this thesis looked at collections of biog-raphies of the commoner (yeohang) class (Yeohangjeongijip) from the mid-19th century - which have thus far been researched primarily from the perspective of literary studies - as a historical resource, and or-ganized the information on the various people featured in the biographies. The factual information about the various historical figures and cited his-torical documents mentioned within the collections of biographies collec-tions was compiled into a digital environment database. This approach was taken because when the relationships between the data are observed in detail, various meaningful stories can be discovered which have other-wise not yet been paid attention.
The specific historical texts used as research material in this thesis are the most representative 19th-century collections of biographies of the commoner class: Hosanoesa (壺山外史), Ihyanggyeonmunnok (里鄕見聞錄), and Huijoilsa (熙朝軼事). Among the various figures featured in these three collections, 20 individuals appear in all three, and were thus taken as the main focus of this research. The biographies mention the families of which these individuals were a member, the government offices and po-etry societies at which they were active, the various other people with whom they met (both those who feature in their own biographies and those who do not), and the specific documents they referenced. This vari-ous information was designed into an ontology and compiled as a seman-tic database. In the process of organizing the data, other historical docu-ments such as literary collections, ancient documents, and genealogical records, as well as representative historical governmental records such as the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty (Joseon wangjo sillok), the Daily Record of the Royal Secretariat (Seungjeongwon ilgi), and the Daily Records of the Royal Court and Important Officials (Ilseongnok), were referenced in addition to the three main research subject texts.
Through the database designed in this way, the relationships between the authors of the three biographical collections, the relationships be-tween the authors and the people referenced in the text, and the relation-ships among the people referenced in the text could all be looked at from various angles. The context of the various stories of the commoners of the late Joseon period stretching across various documents was re-searched and the meaningful stories discovered in this process were organized. The database compiled through this research is publically available on the Web. In the future, if various researchers share and uti-lize the database as is the goal of digital humanities, this database will contribute to furthering the research on the extent of commoner culture in the late Joseon period, such as the characteristics of 19th-century commoner literature and the status and activity range of commoners.