Characterising the evolution of Seo Jeong-Ju’s poetic world through computational analysis on keywords, topics, and sentiments

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a quantitative, computational analysis of the evolution of the poems of Seo Jeong-Ju (1915–2000), Korea’s eminent 20th-century. The publications of his books of poems are un- derstood to have marked the evolution of his poetry, which we explore in this work using modern data-processing techniques for capturing his changing compositional styles. First, we focus on the words related to colour and the names of Korea’s historical kingdoms conjectured as forming the identity of Seo’s poetry in past qualitative studies. We count the frequencies of twelve colours and eight historical Kingdoms and see how they change over time that point to the trends in Seo’s compositional style. We also analyse his poetry using the tools of computational linguistics. Topic Modeling refers to a set of methods that discover groups of important words appearing together in a text and allow us to identify its topic. We cross-reference the topics with other poets’ and critics’ writings from the era. Sentiment Analysis refers to determining the positivity or negativity of the sentiment of a given text. the emotional air of a work is naturally aroused by the artist’s creative choices reflecting their thoughts or feeling. In addition, by using a general level of positive or negative language in creation, the writer can express his or her intention. The evolution in the sentiment of poems, therefore, could also indicate a meaningful characteristic of the works. Existing classical studies on him have focusing on only a limited set of materials and periods. Our work showcases the ability of modern computational tools to verify the findings from traditional studies, and propose questions.