과거 합격자 시맨틱 데이터베이스를 활용한 디지털 인문학 연구

Abstract

In this article, how the Bangmok(榜目) documents, which are essentially lists of successful passers for the civil competitive examination system of the Chosŏn dynasty, when rendered into digitalized formats, could serve as source of information, which would not only lets us know the Chosŏn individuals’ social backgrounds and bloodlines but also enables us to understand the intricate nature that the Yangban network had, will be discussed. In digitalized humanity studies, the Bangmok materials, literally a list of leading elites of the Chosŏn period, constitute a very interesting and important source of information. Based upon these materials, we can see how the society -as well as the Yangban community- was like. Currently, all data inside these Bangmok lists are rendered in XML(eXtensible Makrup Language) format and are being served through DBMS(Database Management System), so anyone who would want to examine the statistics could freely do so. Also, by connecting the data in these Bangmok materials with data from genealogy records, we could identify an individual’s marital relationship, home town, and political affiliation, and therefore create a complex narrative that would be effective in describing that individual’s life in particular. This is a graphic database, which shows-when Bangmok data is punched in-successful passers as individual nodes, and displays blood and marital relations in a very visible way. Clicking upon the nodes would provide you with access to all kinds of relationships formed among more than 90 thousand successful passers, and even the overall marital network, once the genealogical data is input. In Korea, since 2005 and through now, the task of digitalizing data from the Civil exam Bangmok(Mun-gwa Bangmok), Military exam Bangmok (Mu-gwa Bangmok), the “Sa-ma” Bangmok and “Jab-gwa” Bangmok materials, has been completed. They can be accessed through a website(http://people.aks.ac.kr/index.aks) which has information on numerous famous past Korean individuals. With this kind of source of information, we are now able to extract professional Jung-in figures from these lists. However, meaningful and practical studies using this data are yet to be announced. This article would like to remind everyone that this information should be used as a window through which we could see not only the lives of individuals, but also the society.