Sijo is a traditional Korean verse form that has roots stretching back to the fourteenth century. The grant will help create a venue where poets working in English can learn about and experiment with the centuries-old form.

The Korea Text Initiative is a awarded one of nine highly-competitive grants offered by Microsoft as part of its Cloud for Global Good program. The grant will enable the KTI to share its innovative approaches to engaging  Korean texts by offering the power of cloud computing and new, cutting-edge text mining and text modeling services  to  humanities researchers, artists, and readers around the world.

This project utilizes Mo文oN_Cut&Search image-pattern matching techniques and the power of cloud computing to investigate the historical use of Hunmin Chŏngŭm, the alphabetic writing system developed in the fifteenth-century Korea. The aim is to gain insights into the Korean language and an understanding of the sounds associated with the panch’iŭm (ㅿ) and the double hieŭt (ㆅ) , as well as change  in the sounds used in present-day Korean.

Mo文oN_Cut&Search image-pattern matching software, cloud enabled machine learning techniques, and data from the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative at UC Berkeley will be used to train computers to read images of more than 10 million characters on 180,000  woodblock pages of the Tripitaka Koreana, a thirteenth century collection of Buddhist texts.

The KTI begins a collaboration with the National Assembly Library of Korea that aims to make Mo文oN_Cut&Search and the power of cloud computing available to library patrons  so that the library's unique collection and Korea's rich textual tradition can be mined, mapped, and explored in ways never before been possible.

This informal workshop sponsored by the KTI and the UIC History Research Institute at Yonsei University was an opportunity for participants to consider how texts might be read as data and, conversely, how data might be read as texts. Presenters Wayne de Fremery,  Chad Denton, Hyunju Bae, and Cindy A. Nguyen offered ideas about the relationship between texts and data in the morning session and presented new tools for de/constructing data and con/texts in the afternoon.

Sijo an international journal of poetry and song is devoted to publishing germinative poetry, art, and song that claims to participate in the sijo tradition, which has roots in Korean antiquity. The first issue of the journal was released in a limited edition of 300 copies to coincide with sijo writing workshops and performances at St. Mary's College of California on January 25. For more information about the journal and its wider release in April, visit sijopoet.org.

Sijo an international journal of poetry and song is devoted to publishing germinative poetry, art, and song that claims to participate in the sijo tradition, which has roots in Korean antiquity. The second issue of the journal was released in a limited edition of 300 copies to coincide with sijo writing workshops and performances at UC Berkeley, St. Mary's College of California, and Washington University in St. Louis.  For more information about the journal, visit sijopoet.org.

As part of its exploration of the boundaries of sijo as an artistic form/ forms, the editors of Sijo an international journal of poetry and song  are working with documentary filmmaker Michael Unger to produce a documentary short. The documentary will be in three parts: part one will document and describe sijo as a musical tradition. Part two will investigate sijo as literary art. The twist and turn of part three will document how contemporary artists around the world are experimenting with sijo to develop new modes of artistic expression, everything from new musical genres to computer-generated, 3D-printed sculpture. Filming has already begun (see the images below). We plan to wrap up production in the winter of 2019-2020 and submit the documentary to a number of international film festivals in 2020, including the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), the Berlin International Film Festival, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

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The Korea Text Initiative and Seagate, the maker of computer storage devices,  have partnered to help preserve Korean texts. As part of their joint efforts to focus attention on textual preservation and the ways that digital technologies are transforming Korea's textual history, KTI and Seagate organized a gallery exhibition in Seoul that featured a description of how sijo has changed through time. The exhibition has even peaked the interest of the South Korean media.