우물 안 개구리

The Google Books project is an exciting new chapter in the world’s digitization of printed materials together with the Gutenberg project. I have blogged at Frog in a Well – Korea about some old English-language works on Korea that are available for download in text form from the latter. On my own weblog I have expressed some frustration with the limits imposed by Google Books on the viewing of works which are not protected by copyright here.

There has been a recent piece of news about the Google Books project which was announced on the Google Books own weblog here at the end of August. Many books that can be found on Google Books, which are out of copyright (or rather, which Google has decided to treat in that manner), can now be completely downloaded in PDF format.

Some notes about this feature:

1) The downloaded work is an image PDF, usually 1-15MB in size. The text metadata for each book is not in the downloaded document. This means you cannot search for text within the document once it is downloaded, but must return to Google Books in order to search the contents.
2) Some books which a) are no longer protected by copyright b) Google recognizes as no longer being protected by allowing you to browse an unlimited number of pages from the work are strangely not available for download. For example, Miyakawa, Masuji’s My Life in Japan, published in the United States in 1907 can be fully viewed online and is not protected by copyright, cannot be downloaded as of today.
3) Many of the old books, especially those which cannot be downloaded despite their lack of copyright coverage, have huge “Image Not Available” error messages where the pages should be. Strangely, you can still search the text metadata for these books and return results. Clicking on the search result pages, however, will simply show “Image Not Available.” Other books have some pages missing but some showing.
4) As I have discussed elsewhere, some books which cannot possibly be covered by copyright are only shown in “snippet mode” and in some cases, searching their contents returns completely unexplainable and mistaken results. For example, the 1910 Highways and Homes of Japan by lady Kate Lawson is bizarrely shown only in snippet mode and as this snapshot shows, searching for “Japan” within the book gives completely wrong results.
5. The page images for tables of contents are in many cases hyperlinked. You can click directly on chapter titles in the table of contents to jump to that chapter.

How to search for books related to Korea that are out of copyright:

The easiest way is to search for something specific on the Google Books web site. However, that will return mostly results that are still protected by copyright. See this excellent summary of copyright protection at Cornell for how to determine roughly if something is protected that was published in the United States. All things published in the United States before 1923, regardless, are now in the public domain, no exceptions. There is no reason Google should restrict access to those materials insofar as it assumes visitors are viewing the content in the United States (its website says as much in its warning to those outside the US).

IN TITLE – If you want to search for something in the title, either use the “Advanced Search” link or simply precede your search with “intitle:” For example: intitle:Korea or intitle:”Korea and Her Neighbors”

BY DATE – To restrict yourself to the period when all books are in the public domain, you can specify a date year range using “date:” So for example: date:1800-1922. You can also specifi “Full view books” in the advanced search page to see only results in books that can be fully viewed.

So searching for books with Korea in the title, published from 1700-1922 can be found by entering: intitle:Korea date:1700-1922

Some examples of books that can be downloaded, found merely through searching for Japan in the title, some of which you might recognize:

Korea and Her Neighbors: A Narrative of Travel, with an Account of the Recent Vicissitudes and…
By Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird 1905 (quoted frequently in the series of postings here at Frog in a Well starting here)

Korean Tales: Being a Collection of Stories Translated from the Korean Folk Lore, Together with…
By Horace Newton Allen 1889

Problems of the Far East: Japan, Korea, China
By George Nathaniel Curzon 1894

Glimpses of the Orient, Or, The Manners, Customs, Life and History of the People of China, Japan…
By Trumbull White 1897

Terry’s Japanese Empire, Including Korea and Formosa: With Chapters on Manchuria, the Trans-Siber…
By T. Philip (Thomas Philip) Terry 1914

List of Korean Geographical Names, Forming an Index to the Map of Korea: Published at Gotha, and…
By Ernest Mason Satow (mispelled Satorv) 1884

The Diseases of China, including Formosa and Korea
By W. Hamilton (William Hamilton) Jefferys 1910

Ewa: A Tale of Korea
By W. Arthur (William Arthur) Noble 1906

Owen has posted some great links on the study of pre-modern Korean history. In one of his postings he mentioned the National History Compilation Committee (국사편찬위원회 國史編纂委員會). I poked around the site when Owen linked to it but had no idea they had great modern materials as well.

A Japanese friend of mine just returned to Japan and Waseda after spending a week here collection some colonial period materials. He was hoping he could buy a copy of Yun Ch’i-ho’s original Chinese/English diary while he was here which he had heard was out of print and only now available in Korean. I went used book shopping with him but we had no luck. However, after his return, he discovered—and was kind enough to tell me—that the entire diary is online via the 국사편찬위원회 website.

To find this diary, simply go to the history.go.kr website, enter 尹致昊日記 or 윤치호일기 in the search box and you will find three hits. The first hit will lead you to a volume index, followed by a year and month index where you can read his entries directly online. Whoever compiled it was also nice enough to mark proper nouns as “People” or “Places.” If you are not sure what kind of thing one of the specially colored words are, simply hover your mouse over it and it will tell you whether it is a person, place, etc.

A few items from the news, blogs, etc.

• The Reverend Corwin & Nellie Taylor Collection at the Korean Heritage Library, part of the USC digital image collection. Great stuff.
• Going back a bit, two news items on Koryo archaeology: a joint North-South palace excavation and a massive deposit of pottery

Stephen Epstein posted a message on the Korean Studies email list with links to some new reviews of books related to Korea. You can find the full index of books reviewed so far here. The latest books reviewed and the links to those reviews are below in no particular order:

Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. By Linda S. Lewis, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, Center of Korean Studies, University of Hawai’i, 2002.

Korea’s Divided Families: Fifty Years of Separation, by James Foley. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003

Korea and Globalization: Politics, Economics, Culture, edited by James Lewis and Amadu Sesay. New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002

A Distant and Beautiful Place , by Yang Kwi-Ja (trans. Kim So-young and Julie Pickering). Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2003

Yesterday I paid a visit to the Korea Foundation’s Cultural Center (한국국제교류재단 문화센터). The center features gallery space, seminar and movie rooms, and a lending library. I also noticed at the center a notice listing times for free Korean lessons. The library is a small but very nice place to visit if you are in Seoul, don’t have easy access to a large research library in the city, and want to read or check out works about Korea, especially in non-Korean languages. There are half a dozen seats, a long sofa, some computers to access the library catalog, and a few thousand volumes available. They also have a collection of recent journals related to Korean studies, a small reference section, a Korean music collection, and a small collection of DVDs of Korean movies.

Full members of the center can check out two books at a time from the library for two weeks (plus one renewal) and can take advantage of their inter-library loan system to get works they don’t have access to. However, in order to become a member you have to be in Korea more than a month, make a 10,000 deposit for the period of membership, and unfortunately cannot get membership immediately on your first visit. According to a librarian there, you have to wait two days or so for your membership to come through.

The cultural center also offers other regular events such as Korean and non-Korean movies, art and lecture events, etc. The website has a lot of this information and members get a newsletter. However, the library website is not well designed. If you are unfortunate enough to be using web browsers other than Internet Explorer or a non-Windows machine, you may have trouble signing up as a member through their online form (JavaScript Issues), and cannot easily access the library’s pages or their search engine. I hope the center will improve their website in the future and make it function under standard’s compliant browsers.

It is unfortunate that excellent resources like these are often not well known. I remember a very similar small-scale international library in Yokohama, located a dozen or so floors up Landmark Tower that had very few visitors. This made it an ideal as a quiet place to study and get internet access in the middle of the city and I often studied there while a student at IUC. I imagine that there are many visitors to Korea who might be staying or living in the country for some time who may not know that there are these kinds of resources available.

Location: 1st floor of the JoonAng Ilbo Building five minutes walk from Exit 9 of the City Hall Station on Line 1 and 2.
Opening Times: Monday to Saturday 10:30 to 18:00 (until 21:00 on Wednesdays)

A few recent messages on the KoreanStudies email list pointed out that the Gutenberg Project has a few old Korean books online. They are a wonderful resource to learn more about how past generations have viewed and described Korea and often contain small tidbits of information not available elsewhere (especially to students who may not read any Korean).

You can read recent KS messages from July here. They include discussion of an ongoing effort to create a digitized version of Isabella Bird Bishop’s Korea and Her Neighbours and a draft of the 2nd volume, which still needs proofing, has been posted by Thomas Duvernay in his posting here. In a separate posting Brother Anthony at Sogang University pointed out that several of Bishop’s other books are already available for download in the Gutenberg collection.

Here are links some currently available books mentioned on the email list or which I found myself on Gutenberg’s site (Tip to Brother Anthony for pointing these out):

Korea’s Fight for Freedom by F. A. Mckenzie (1920) – Not his famous The Tragedy of Korea but a later (and more updated) book which expands his earlier arguments.

Corea or Cho-sen by A. Henry Savage Landor (1895) – An HTML version with fully scanned pictures is available in an HTML version here.

Our Little Korean Cousin by Henry Lee Mitchell Pike (1905) – Online version complete with the original pictures here.

As I have pointed out in a posting on my own blog, many of the books at Gutenberg have been scanned and then checked through a distributive proofreading process. I would love to see many more of these older works, which were published long enough ago to be in the public domain, online and available in various formats such as those provided by the wonderful Gutenberg project.

The advantage of distributive proofreading is obvious: there are many eyes which check over the work but each person need only contribute a little. The process is divided into several stages and has already added over a thousand public domain books to the project.

If you are interested in contributing to this process, either by adding scanned works with their unproofed OCRed files, or by offering a little bit of time to correct some of the books (there are several books related to Asia currently being proofread) then visit the:

Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders Webpage

I thought I’d write a quick post about another web resource I’ve just started to use quite a bit recently. This is the online Glossary of Korean Studies put together by the Academy of Korean Studies. I’ll start with a gripe: the search function doesn’t work in Firefox. Ok, now that’s out of the way I can say that I think this is an absolutely wonderful resource – it’s massive and generally seems very well put together. The methodology that they have used is to rely, where possible, on a body of English-language books on Korean history mainly written or translated by Western scholars as their basic source material for translations of Korean historical terms. Specifically, the books that seem to have been most commonly used are Yi Kibaek’s A New History of Korea, translated by Edward W. Wagner; James B. Palais’ Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea; Martina Deuchler’s The Confucian Transformation of Korea and Han Woo-Keun’s The History of Korea. Obviously there are limitations to this approach – most of these books are now quite old and more recent works may have opted for other translations. But in general they seem like a pretty good selection particularly since they are very respected and established works that all undergraduates studying Korean history are likely to encounter at some point or another.

In general I think it is a good idea that we have standardised translations of Korean historical terms as well as standardised transliterations (actually the AKS glossary provides transliterations in both the current government system and M-R). It can certainly be confusing reading about the Ministry of Taxation in one book, the Board of Finance in another and the Board of Revenue in yet another (I’m talking about the Chosŏn dynasty central government institution called the Hojo 戶曺). Having said that, I would be wary of advocating in principle that all scholars use the same terms. Clearly people might have very specific reasons why they prefer one translation to another or they might want to challenge a particular translation on the grounds that it is not an accurate reflection of the meaning of the original (Sino)-Korean term.

An example that I can give you from my own research is that of the terms sijŏn 市廛 and yugŭijŏn 六矣廛. You will usually find these translated as ‘licensed store/shop’ and the ‘six licensed stores’ (as they are in the AKS Glossary). This takes the character 廛 to mean a shop, which is in one sense correct as the term sijŏn did indeed refer to the merchants’ shops that lined the streets of central Seoul during the Chosŏn period. However, in practice, the terms sijŏn and yugŭijŏn actually referred to the groupings of merchants arranged into guilds according to the products they sold. When government documents refer to the sijŏn or yugŭijŏn they are referring to these merchants’ organisations that actually interacted with the government on behalf of the individual merchants. Thus in my work I always use the term ‘guild’ to translate sijŏn and ‘Six Guilds’ to translate yugŭijŏn as I think the translation ‘licensed stores’ can be quite misleading to the modern reader.

For readers interested in more early Western views of Korea and Koreans in a similar vein to those that Konrad has looked at in his series of posts here, Thomas Duvernay has posted chapters on Korea from John D. Ford’s 1905 travelogue An American Cruiser in the East at his website. (Actually the rest of his site on traditional Korean archery looks interesting too.) Good on him for putting this stuff out there for everyone to access.

Here’s a passage on Seoul that interested me since I am working on late Chosŏn commerce:

The shops are mean, and it is difficult to find fancy articles of Korean make. The best way to obtain curiosities is to let your wants be known as soon after your arrival as possible, name a place and date where you can be seen, and you will be waited upon by merchants who deal in such wares. Fans, antique metal-work, Korean coins and mats can be obtained in this way. The prices will be high, as the articles are rare and the owners not anxious to part with them.

It should be noted that by 1905 the merchants of Seoul had suffered from one blow after another (inflation, the collapse of government finances, loss of monopolies, massive currency devaluation and competition from Japanese and Chinese traders) so things may have been different had the author arrived some years earlier in the capital.

Big thanks to Katrina for putting together our fourth Asian history carnival. You can find it at Miscellany.

I will be hosting the third edition of the Asian History Carnival on Sunday, March 5. Deadline for nominations of posts — anything about Asian history written since the last edition in mid-December — is Saturday, March 4th.

You can send nominations to me (jonathan at froginawell dot net) or use the handy Blog Carnival Submission Form.

Spread the word!