“Humanities Content” and Its Discontent

This chapter provides an overview of the remarkable but peculiar history of digital humanities and its contemporary development in South Korea. Computer-assisted humanities research in Korean studies began with the Wagner-Song Munkwa Project, which was launched in 1967 and lasted for more than three decades. This landmark achievement inspired many database-building projects, including the Sillok Project, in the following years. In the early 2000s, as a new discourse of “digital humanities” emerged in response to the “crisis” of the humanities in South Korean academia, another effort to connect the humanities through digital media to the culture industry gained momentum. “Humanities content” has since dominated the South Korean digital humanities landscape for over a decade. While recovering major digital humanities-related accomplishments, this chapter reveals that constant tension between the non-commercial, academic digital humanities and the commercial, industrial humanities content has been shaping and reshaping computer-assisted humanities scholarship in South Korea.

Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Félix Guattari's Ecosophical Perspective

Arguably, two of the most important forces affecting contemporary global culture are the growing awareness of ecological crises and the rapid spread of digital media. Félix Guattari's unfinished concept of ecosophy suggests the basis of a theoretical framework for constructing productive syntheses between the ecological and the digital. Moreover, a Guattarian rethinking of the ecological turn in the humanities challenges the philosophical basis of the pedagogy of Nature appreciation that has characterised the eco-humanities landscape since the 1970s. Guattari's ecosophy gestures towards a transversal eco-humanities, which would be rhizomatically rooted in autopoiesis and becoming-other, rather than defined by static allegiance to the ideals of ‘Self-realisation’ postulated by the deep ecology movement.