Building a Life Course Database for Family History and Historical Demography in Pre-Modern Korean History

SANGKUK LEE, Ajou University
Jan Kok, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

Collecting data over a long-time horizon and across a wide range of fields is challenging. More often than not the collected data from different fields lack identifying information, a large amount of non-random missingness is very common, and individual records need to be matched using meta information not fully found. Certainly, the recent advancement in data technology in storing, analyzing, and visualizing large-scale data, so-called “big data techniques,” provides immense opportunities to easily transform historical data into a digital form. This changed research environment is urging the quantitative and qualitative transformation of Korean history research, and leads to long-term and macroscopic study using digitized data. In this paper, we explore how to collect and to organize pre-modern Korean historical materials into a life course database for family history and historical demography. We review historical materials in pre-modern Korean history and discuss how to construct data for life course study based on the experience of European studies, especially the Netherlands. It also examines the characteristics of Korean data and possible research topics for family history and historical demography based on a life course database we will build.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 233. The Historical Life Course Trends of the Pre-Modern Korean Elite Families in the Long Run: Lessons and Implication from Chinese and European Studies