Munkwa project files, 1961-1998

This subseries documents Wagner’s work developing a data resource for the analysis of traditional Korean political-social elite society during the Korean Yi Dynasty (1392-1910). The bulk of the records consists of samples of civil examination rosters, computer input code sheets, clan genealogy lists, and lexicons which were used by Wagner to compile his listing of 14,600 successful candidates in the five-hundred-year history (1393-1894) of the highest civil service examination during Korea’s Yi Dynasty. In the form of a computer printout, Wagner’s listing consisted of a string of data for each candidate including marriage connections, birth and death years, father’s name, clan affiliation, residence, and year of examination.

The records in this subseries illustrate Wagner’s use of computers to analyze the examinations rosters of successful civil service candidates during the Yi Dynasty. Wagner’s annotations and notes in the computer printouts, including those with listings of Korean clans and individuals that passed the lower-level sama and higher-level munkwa examinations, chronicle the routine editing Wagner performed in his attempts to weed out variant data and locate sources in which supplementary data could be found on civil examination candidates. Handwritten family registers, clan genealogies, including a copy of the sixteenth-century Genealogy of the Munhwa Yu Clan, and family lineages illuminate Wagner’s attempts to verify, augment, and bolster his data. Many of these sources are written in Chinese.

Wagner’s Romanization of surnames, place names, and other terminology such as office and post names, to enhance the speed and accuracy of computer analysis, is detailed in this subseries. Unfortunately, the Munkwa project involved data that could not be coded practically in Romanization, including Chinese character data. Wagner’s use of a four-digit coding system that assigned sequences of letters or numbers to Chinese characters, so that Chinese given or personal names could be readily determined, is illustrated in heavily annotated telegraphic code books, code lists, and lexicons. Additionally, basic code sheets, line printouts of punch cards, and serial listings of coded names reveal the steps taken to transfer Chinese character data from source material to computer tape, to computer output.

Other records in this subseries are project descriptions and reports authored by Wagner and his collaborator, Professor June-ho Song, describing preliminary research results of the Munkwa project; and correspondence which chiefly recounts the role computerization had in Wagner’s research. Also included are articles that describe early examples of computational linguistics research at Harvard in the late 1960s, particularly in the graphical representation of nonstandard characters (Chinese) on a computer. Wagner’s analysis of civil examinations in Korea’s three northern provinces, Hwanghae, P’yŏngan and Hamgyŏng, The Civil Examination Process as Social Leaven: The Case of the Northern Provinces in the Yi Dynasty (1975), is also found in this subseries.