Spatializing Simdogihaeng travelogue (1906): place recognition and heritage authorization on Ganghwa Island

In the early 20th century, Go Jae-hyung authored Simdogihaeng, a travelogue focusing on Ganghwa Island. This study explores the narratives in Simdogihaeng, leveraging theories of cognition and literature as its theoretical foundation. It defines “recognition” in narrative contexts through the lens of epistemology. This approach provides a solid foundation for understanding the intricacies of narrative construction and interpretation in literature. Methodologically, this study operationalizes “monumentalization” as measurable spatial–textual patterns and analyzes the narratives of Simdogihaeng using digital humanities techniques. This study employs innovative techniques from the emerging field of digital humanities to analyze the narratives of Simdogihaeng. Using Gaussian kernel density estimation (KDE), it geocodes place references at 125 unique locations with uncertainty profiling and visualizes narrative concentration. Furthermore, poetic and prose registers are analyzed using noun-based term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) to identify distinctive recognition. The results suggest that Simdogihaeng encapsulates and amplifies Go Jae-hyung’s recognitions and expressions, privileging shrines and commemorative sites associated with Confucian moral–ritual order. This recognition differs from contemporary Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), which focuses on military heritage (dondae) on Ganghwa Island. This study offers insights into how the writer perceives and articulates his experiences of Ganghwa Island.