Analysis of the message of Gam Eung-Story in Taesanggameung-pyeon through text mining

This study aims to analyze the message of Taesanggameung-pyeon published by the Joseon royal family in the 19th century through text mining. As it was issued by the state, the text of Taesanggameung-pyeon occupies a special position. In addition, the title and genre regulation of the book constitute a superficial message centered on “Taoism, the transcendental, good and evil, and cause and effect.” Superficial messages may trigger cognitive bias in the reading process. Data mining enables a new interpretation of texts that are prone to cognitive biases in that it treats fine-scale text information, which is easy to miss by human attention, as having the same value as information in units that human cognition readily understands. In this article, frequency analysis of vocabulary, visualization of vocabulary characteristics, and topic-oriented visualization were conducted to determine the actual message delivered to the readers of Taesang󰠀gameung-pyeon, which has a strong superficial message. For the linguistic approach and visualization, quantitative analysis techniques such as word cloud, TF-IDF, word2Vec, K-means clustering, and topic modeling were used. Following text mining focused on the vocabulary used in Taesanggameung-pyeon, the ethics emphasized in Taesanggameung- pyeon is not religion-specific, but has general applicability, and the desire that the Gam Eung Story satisfies is a transcendent desire. Rather, it was confirmed that it was a desire to make up for worldly and everyday shortcomings. This affords new insights in that it is distinct from the results of earlier qualitative studies.