Garrison Records
Garrison Records (軍營謄錄) is a collection of daily logs kept by Chosŏn’s central armies for almost three centuries (1615-1882). It amounts to a total of 689 books and is spread across two sites – Jangseogak Archives in Seongnam (569 books) and Kyujanggak Archives in Seoul (120 books). This collection not only contains vital information about the duties and functions of capital armies as institutions aimed at war, including entries about drill, recruitment and weapon procurement. They also include information about social and economic issues related to the military such as abuse of violence by soldiers, monopoly of city markets by military enterprises, and class conflicts between aristocrats and lowborn musketeers.
This vast corpus has been partially transcribed and digitized by the Jangseogak Archives. In my project, I’ve successfully procured from this archive the entire corpus of transcribed texts from the Garrison Records (about 45,000 entries), and began building a relational database with biographical and spatial indices. With the eventual completion of the archive’s digitization projects, my database will expand further to include three centuries of sequential data. The vastness and digital accessibility of the Garrison Records confer on my project a unique potential to query Korea’s premodern past.
While the corpus is undergoing digitization, working with the original sources is indispensable. My preliminary research confirmed that Garrison Records contains various types of marginalia, including side annotations as well as glued-in “Post-Its” and hidden memos inside the folios. Interpreting these marginalia, which are either undecipherable or misplaced in the digitized versions, are the focus of my prospective research trip to South Korea in 2017.