Introduction
Historians of premodern Korea enjoy unparalleled access to nearly every primary source from before 1900, owing to the South Korean government’s sustained investment in cultural heritage digitization over the past twenty-seven years (Kim; Cha, “Digital/Humanities”; Cha, “Digital Korean Studies”). The Korean Historical Databases portal alone hosts more than one hundred collections,1 and...
This article presents a rigorous critique of digital history methodologies, particularly in the context of premodern Korean studies. The author highlights the tension between the promise of digitized archives and the practical challenges of integrating fragmented, heterogeneous sources. The discussion of macroscopes—tools designed to reveal large-scale patterns—is particularly insightful, as it underscores their current limitations in bridging macro and micro historical perspectives. The Munkwa ...