Riding the wave of digital transformation that is taking place around the world today, Korea is beginning to build digital archives of various cultural contents around the 21st century. In recent years, digitization of humanities texts has been carried out in a wide range of fields, and this research team's "Building a Digital Archive of Protestant Missionary Letters from Korea (1880-1942)" is also attempted in the same context. Through the process of conducting research, the research team realized the advantages and limitations of building a digital archive, which is in line with the ambivalence of 'cognitive automation' that all digital archives eventually aim for. As OpenAI's ChatGPT demonstrates, the digitization of humanities texts may eventually relieve us of the drudgery of passive thinking and spur us on to greater creativity. However, alongside these positive aspects, there is a risk of loss of text personality in unauthenticity and blind following of cognitive automation driven by scientism. If we overlook these issues, we could end up causing a great deal of social disruption and unnecessary expense in the future. Therefore, based on Bernard Lonergan's cognitive theory, this paper aims to redefine scientism in cognitive terms, and to suggest the pursuit of authenticity and the recovery of text personality as the role of critical digital humanities in the era of digital transformation. This can be a way to be vigilant against the craving for scientism that exists in all digital archive construction that is being attempted in the wave of digital transformation.

Authors:
Jong Woo Kim, Yonsei University, South Korea

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Jong Woo Kim is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Yonsei University in South Korea

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