Projects

The research programmes and output I have under way: what each one asks, and who I work with.

Computational history of colonial Korean print

Dissertation, in progress

My dissertation is the programme the rest of this work grows out of: two material histories of colonial Korean print, read across very large digitized collections with computer vision and language models. It runs on two strands: Typography & Printshops, which reads four colonial-Seoul printing houses working from the same imported type and asks whether shop-level signatures survive in how each weights and finishes shared letterforms, and Advertising & Consumer Culture, which detects and reads the advertising record of the colonial press at scale.

Strands
Typography & Printshops, Advertising & Consumer Culture
Methods
Computer vision, text mining, large language models
Affiliation
Leiden University

Textbooks, Nation, and AI: Reconstructing Korean National Identity

Collaboration, active

A full-corpus computational reading of South Korea's national-history textbooks, every kuksa volume published between 1895 and 2016. Large language models surface the terms the books use for the nation, and sentence embeddings track how that language changes as the books are rewritten.

Collaboration
Steven Denney (PI), Leiden University
Funding
Academy of Korean Studies (한국학중앙연구원)
Grant
KS-2026-R-094
Corpus
67 kuksa textbooks, 1895–2016

More across the site: the full publication record and a list of talks.

Aron van de Pol, Leiden © 2026