Speaker
Description
The bibliographer and literary critic Jerome McGann has written that “original documents are fictions we practice in order to manage their losses and our limits” (A New Republic of Letters, 5). This talk considers how a corpus of early twentieth-century Korean novels and periodicals is being practiced as a new kind of fiction within prototype software called Mo文oNExplorer. It describes how a loosely organized team comprising an American Koreanist, a Korean small business owner, a Korean startup founder, and a Vietnamese programmer attempted to engineer contexts of use for older Korean texts: presenting them again as digital transcriptions, as translations into contemporary Korean for present-day readers, and as indexed passages resituated and summarized through a RAG system. The aim was to create a fiction that might someday be practiced usefully within institutional settings such as the National Library of Korea.