| Professor Wayne de Fremery holds up a 3D model to explain how it was made at his office in Sogang University in western Seoul, March 9. / Courtesy of Microsoft |
Foreign professor offers Korean literature as high-tech edutainment
By Yun Suh-young
Imagine there's a poem you'd like to send to your loved one. Instead of mundanely writing it out or printing it, you want to find a fresh and unique way to turn this poem into something really interesting. You decide to print it out in 3D.
With technology made available from the MooN Project, you're now able to create a funky physical model of the poem through a program that analyzes the patterns of Korean letters and converts them into a 3D model. You wrap that "poem" in a box to send as a gift. Now you have a secret language to share _ a poem that only you and your counterpart can understand.
As funky as this sounds, the technology is already available for the Korean language, developed by a foreigner. American professor Wayne de Fremery at Sogang University in Seoul has taken the initiative to transfer Korean literary texts into 2D and 3D digital forms. De Fremery and the Korea Text Initiative, part of the Cambridge Institute for the Study of Korean, have been advancing this project with the support of Microsoft which awarded them a research grant of $50,000 to use its Azure cloud computing platform.
"The same codes that would show as a poem in a computer can also be used to make these types of things. We can remodel the poems into 3D space and make them into jewelry or do exhibitions," de Fremery said during an interview with The Korea Times.
"'Is this really a poem?' my students would ask when I show them the 3D models. When I say this is Kim So-wol's poem, they go 'yeah right.' Then we can start a conversation about how the poem works."
It's a great way to engage students in the literary works of well-known poets or writers such as Kim, he said.
"Students have gotten too much of him in middle and high school and never want to hear it again so I wondered how to get students excited about people like him," he said.
| A 3D model of Kim So-wol's "Jindalleggot" (azalea) |
The idea is to take the code of each letter when typed into a computer and transfer the information into a 3D context. When a poem is turned into 3D, it is possible to identify certain patterns in the poem more easily, because it is physically visible.
"The model that we built shows that the Korean parts of the poem are clustered in one area and the hanja (Chinese characters) in a different spot. From this model you can see the poem has two parts that are different from the rest of it," he said holding up a 3D model of Kim So-wol's "Jindalleggot" (azalea).
"We've also done theater exhibits where we modeled all of Kim So-wol's poems as a forest so you can walk into it. We also worked with virtual reality where people put oculus goggles on and go into the forest."
But de Fremery's project isn't just about fun and entertainment. The 3D modeling is an extension of the digitization effort of Korean literature, represented by "MooN Cut & Search."
His "The MooN Project" involves two separate projects _ MooN Cut & Search and MooN 3D Modeling. Whereas the latter was the fun part, the former is a more serious endeavor about developing a program to search and cut Korean words, letters and images by digitizing old Korean literature into computer-recognizable form. The idea is to digitally cut old literary texts and search the same part through all other literature available. In the end, both projects are about connecting Korean literature with emerging fields of data science and re-envisioning how literary texts matter to people.
| Several 3D models created from Korean poems as part of the 'MooN Project' / Courtesy of Microsoft |
"The project began as a way to answer bibliographic questions. My background is in Korean literature and bibliography so I study Korean books, literary books. When I was finishing my doctorate I was collecting a huge amount of data but I was facing problems _ How is this book different from that book? I needed a way to filter and understand that information, search them, organize them. Then I got interested in how to preserve them, and make it available to people," he said.
Initially an economics major, de Fremery received a masters degree from Seoul National University on Korean Studies and a doctoral degree from Harvard on East Asian Languages and Civilization.
"It's hard for a human to go through all the pages and find out what is different in the different books so we use the software to figure out the difference. The basic problem is that a lot of images of Korean texts are available online but you can't access them. The software we're developing is to solve that problem."
During his doctoral research, he realized how errors were made during reproduction of publications. He brought out his dissertation, thicker than a Bible, to show the part that compares different versions of Kim So-wol's "Jindallaeggot" printed in the 1920s.
"For instance, in one of the two versions of Kim's ‘Jindallaeggot,' the last line drops down the page a little bit typographically, like flowers falling down. Looks like there is an error because the letter 'ggot' (flower) is upside down. Is it a mistake? Did Kim So-wol do this or did his printer No Ki-jung do this? If it's printed by somebody else, you can see they also played a role in how we understand the poet. I was trying to answers these kinds of questions," he said.
"But computers are doing the same thing. It loses the initial context. So my question was, how do I keep information about the initial context of the poem? My interest in digital technologies is driven by a desire to understand and better preserve what we might call Korea's analog textual traditions. While digital tools provide fantastic opportunities for exploring Korea's textual history, they can also distort that history."
His research centers on understanding the sociology of texts, such as the people, institutions and material practices associated with making and distributing texts and "how these people, institutions, and practices can alter the ways that we interpret literary texts." This gave rise to the name "The MooN Project," which symbolizes munhwa (culture), munhak (study of literature) and munmyeong (civilization).
Because his parents ran a small publishing company and he paid his way through graduate school by designing book covers and working as a printer representative, he has affection for the people who are behind the making of books.
"I'm interested in how Korea's literature got made, who were the people printing and distributing it. One of the reasons I got interested was because I knew the people who were doing it, and I was one of the people who was doing it," said de Fremery.
When the reporter pointed out it seemed like an "homage to the people who are making books," he said, "that's a great way to put it."