DHAsia Hands-On Clinic | Visualization and Analysis of Korean Genealogical Data using Cytoscape, with Javier Cha

Computational history entails the processing of digitized or born-digital sources using software packages and algorithms designed for use in another discipline or industry. In addition, historians of East Asia may need to consider the support for Unicode encoding or rare Sinitic characters.

Javier Cha will demonstrate the strategies he developed to collate genealogical data and scrape a large amount of text with the aid of a macro program. Thereafter, he will discuss my adaptation of Cytoscape, a network visualization platform designed for bioinformatics, to analyze the robust ties of marriage that contributed to the self-perpetuation and regional division of the early modern Korean yangban aristocrats.

The marriage networks will be compared against the patterns of localization discovered through spatial data and text analysis.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Although focused on the Korean case, the analytical approaches examined here are valuable for scholars working across Asia, on all time periods.