Soliciting Data
The Garrison Records is an archive that is ready-made for digital analysis. Thanks to diligent archivists in Korea, a significant portion of this archive has been and continues to be transcribed and uploaded on the website of the Jangseogak Archives. Upon discovering this, I solicited the Korean government based on a recent statute titled "Act on Promotion of the Provision and Use of Public Data,” and successfully procured all of the transcribed data (about 45,000 entries), including existing indices on biographical and spatial metadata (e.g., XML tags on people, name, places and offices). This statute by the Korean government allows Korean citizens to obtain any public data provided by government institutions as long as the given data do not relate to privacy or national security issues.
In other words, I was able to obtain through this statute all of the currently transcribed text files from the Garrison Records, neatly tagged with relevant biographical and spatial metadata. In the next few years, as Korean archivists continue their efforts at digitization and indexing, my dataset will grow to cover sequential data that span daily for three centuries, a rare feat in premodern history.