Five Centuries of Monarchy in Korea: Mining the Text of the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty

摘要

We present a quantitative study of the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, the daily written records of the five hundred years of a monarchy in Korea. We first introduce the corpus, which is a series of books describing the historical facts during the Joseon dynasty. We then define three categories of the monarchial ruling styles based on the written records and compare the twenty-five kings in the monarchy. Finally, we investigate how kings show different ruling styles for various topics within the corpus. Through this study, we introduce a very unique corpus of monarchial records that span an entire monarchy of five hundred years and illustrate how text mining can be applied to answer important historical questions.