I am a PhD candidate at the Leiden Centre for Digital Humanities and the Leiden Institute for Area Studies at Leiden University.
My PhD research uses computer vision, text mining, and large language models to study the print culture and commercial imagery of colonial Korea. Much of this material survives in large digitized collections that resist conventional close viewing; my work develops computational methods to make them tractable as historical sources. Together with Steven Denney, I also study how Korean national identity is constructed and transmitted through state-authored history textbooks, using computational text analysis.
Positions
Current
- PhD Candidate — Digital Humanities & Korean Studies
- Researcher — Leiden HumAN
- Managing Editor — Korean Histories
- Board Member, Research Planning (연구기획 이사) — KADH
Previous
- Junior Research Fellow — Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies
Education
- M.A. Asian Studies (Korea Focus)
- B.A. Korean Studies
Grants & Fellowships
- Overseas Korean Studies Grant
- Junior Research Fellowship
Dissertation Research
My dissertation takes up two related problems in the material history of colonial Korea, both of which require working across very large collections of digitized print. The two case studies share a common methodological concern: how to move between close viewing and close reading of visual sources without losing sight of either.
Typography & Printshops in Colonial Korea
The first case study concerns the typographic output of Korean printshops during the colonial period. Printshops developed recognizable visual characteristics through their choice of type, composition, and printing practice — characteristics that are legible as material culture shaped by technology, labor, and the political conditions of colonial rule.
I use large-scale image analysis and deep learning to identify recurring visual traits across tens of thousands of printed pages: stroke weight, modulation, alignment, layout density, and compositional rhythm. Earlier scholarship has necessarily relied on close reading of select exemplars; what I attempt is a broader mapping of workshop practice, standardization processes, and the industrialization of Korean textual culture.
Advertising & Consumer Culture in Colonial Korea
The second case study examines the rise of mass advertising in colonial-era newspapers as both a visual and a social phenomenon. Using computer vision, I segment and extract hundreds of thousands of advertisements from newspaper page images. These are then classified and annotated with structured metadata using large language models — a step that makes it possible to treat advertising as quantifiable historical evidence.
The aim is not scale for its own sake, but the construction of a dataset that allows questions about consumer culture, visual persuasion, and commercial networks to be posed across an entire corpus rather than through scattered examples alone.
Projects
Textbooks, Nation, and AI: Reconstructing Korean National Identity
This project uses AI-assisted text analysis and survey methods to study how national identity is constructed and transmitted through South Korean history textbooks. Working with a corpus spanning 1948 through 2016, we use Korean-language large language models to trace how the nation is narrated across successive political regimes — from the post-liberation authoritarian period through the democratic era. A nationally representative survey experiment then tests whether the identity frames encountered during schooling persist into adulthood, drawing its materials directly from the textbook narratives rather than from abstract hypotheticals.
Teaching
Deep Learning for the Humanities
Designer & Instructor. Workshop series on deep learning for humanities research.
AI & the Humanities
Guest Lecturer, Leiden University. 2023, 2025, 2026.
Department of Korean History, SNU
Guest Lecturer, Seoul National University. Feb 2025, Nov 2025.
Special Topics in Digital Humanities
Teaching Assistant, Leiden University. 2022, 2025.
NLP for the Humanities
Teaching Assistant, Leiden University. 2023.
Hacking the Humanities
Teaching Assistant, Leiden University. 2021–2022.