The Bulletin for Korean Historical Studies as a Dataset: Distant Reading and Knowledge Landscape Analysisof Korean Historiography

This study reconstructs the approximately 250,000 metadata entries accumulated in the Bulletin for Korean Historical Studies (한국사연구휘보) as a structured dataset and explores the potential of applying distant reading and knowledge-landscape analysis to the historiography of Korean history. Whereas conventional research-trend surveys rely on qualitative reviews of selected periods and fields, such approaches face structural limitations in capturing the long-term patterns of knowledge production within an ever-expanding scholarly corpus. In response, this study standardizes and cleans the Bibliography’s metadata—including publication year, historical period, field, author, place of publication, and page length—through web- scraping and systematic preprocessing, thereby establishing a reproducible digital foundation for data-driven historiographical analysis. Text-mining results reveal that the research priorities of Korean historians have changed in close interaction with social transformations and the broader intellectual environment. The rapid rise of the keyword “century” and the decline of “essay/survey (시론)” indicate a shift from macro-narrative research toward more granular, period-specific and problem-oriented studies. The long-term dominance of “nation/ethnicity (민족)” and its decline after the 2000s, the concentration of “people/minjung (민중)” in the 1980s–90s, and the dramatic increase of “women” and “environment” since the 2000s demonstrate how the field has continually absorbed contemporary social concerns － democratization, gender sensibilities, ecological issues － into its scholarly agenda. The transition from “under Japanese rule (일제하)” to “colonial period” and “modernity,” along with the growing prominence of “East Asia,” further reflects conceptual reorientation and the expansion of spatial perspective in modern-history scholarship. Knowledge-landscape analysis likewise demonstrates that Korean- history knowledge production constitutes a large-scale, structurally organized academic ecosystem. While annual publication counts have expanded dramatically since the mid-20th century, the data also reveal distinct patterns: the stable rise of journal articles, the economic sensitivity of monograph production, the normalization of article page lengths since the 1990s, and a strong metropolitan concentration supplemented by significant secondary hubs in the Gyeongbuk and Chungcheong regions. These findings confirm that Korean-history scholarship is shaped not only by internal disciplinary developments but also by publishing infrastructures, academic evaluation systems, and regional research networks. Taken together, this study demonstrates that the Korean History Bibliography provides an exceptionally suitable foundation for structural, quantitative, and visual historiography, enabling analyses that were previously unattainable. Data- driven historiographical approaches do not replace traditional qualitative narratives; rather, they extend and complement them by offering a new observational scale through which the cumulative trajectory of Korean-history research can be reinterpreted.