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Poetry Talks:Project
About the Project
Project Description
PoetryTalks.org explores one of East Asia’s most fascinating literary traditions—sihwa, or “poetry talks.” In premodern Korea, China, and across East Asia, poetry was not just art but a living practice central to education, diplomacy, and everyday life. People from all walks of life composed and exchanged poems on the spot, weaving verse into the fabric of social and cultural interaction. This project introduces Sihwa ch’ongnim—a monumental 17th-century anthology by Hong Manjong—as the foundation for the world’s first interactive, multilingual (Chinese, Korean, English, and French) digital archive of sihwa. Using linked open data to connect people, places, poems, and ideas across time, the platform offers readers and researchers new ways to explore how poetry shaped thought, communication, and creativity throughout East Asia.
The project is funded by the Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (2024-2027) under the title Discovering a World of Everyday Poetic Networks: A Multilingual Linked Open Data Archive of Classical Korean Poetry Talks.
Its pilot phase was supported by the following internal grants from Wilfrid Laurier University, including SSHRC General Fund (2022), Category A Internal Grant (2022), Category B Research Equipment Grant (2022).
The pilot project was incubated at the Advanced Topics in Digital Korean Studies Incubation Program (2022) at Seoul National University, Korea.
Project Team
Dr. Christina HAN
Principal Investigator
Associate Professor, History, Wilfrid Laurier University
Christina Han is a historian, digital humanist, and curator specializing in East Asian studies. Her research explores cultural and intellectual developments across East Asia, with a focus on art, literature, and cultural history. Her recent work examines poetry games in both classical Korean literature and contemporary South Korean digital culture. She has translated Sihwa ch’ongnim (Compendium of Remarks on Classical Korean Sinitic Poetry), forthcoming from Brill, a project funded by the Academy of Korean Studies.
Dr. HU Jing
Collaborator
Hu Jing is a social historian of Korea and a specialist in digital Korean studies. She earned her M.A. in Cultural Informatics from the Academy of Korean Studies (2014) and her Ph.D. in History from KU Leuven (2025). Since 2023, she has served as the Subject Specialist for Korean Studies at the Berlin State Library. Her research focuses on Korea’s social history, particularly marginalized groups, and on integrating digital humanities methodologies into historical research.
Dr. Lyndsey TWINING
Research Lead
Lyndsey Twining is a translator and independent researcher specializing in Korean history, traditional culture, and digital curation. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Informatics from the Academy of Korean Studies in 2024, where her dissertation explored how digital curation can enhance access to Korean cultural heritage in education. She has served as translator, lecturer, and consultant for institutions such as the National Museum of Korea, overseeing English-language content for over 6,000 heritage site panels and contributing to numerous digital humanities projects.
CHI Yeong Won
Research Assistant
Ph.D. Candidate, Korea University
Chi Yeong Won specializes in the intersection of Sino-Korean poetry and digital humanities. He is responsible for data schema creation and Korean data translation for the PoetryTalks.org project. His representative work, A Conceptual Data Modeling Attempt for Building a Korean Classical Poetry Database, and his doctoral research, Sino-Korean Poetry Data Archive Construction: A Study Centered on The Collections of Korean Literature, explore new models for structuring and analyzing premodern poetic corpora.
YOON Jonghoon
Research Assistant
Yoon Jonghoon completed a bachelor’s degree in Archaeology and a master’s degree in Cultural Informatics, and currently works at the ARKO Arts Archive. His research interests lie in digital humanities projects centered on Korean culture.