Kim Ji-myung is an independent researcher at the Center for Digital Humanities of the Academy of Korean Studies. She received her Ph.D in 2018 with her dissertation “Developing a Digital Archives and Curation Model for Historical Documents: the Case of National Debt Redemption Movement (1907) in Korea.”

She is a communication specialist by training, with a background in English Literature (BA at Yonsei University) and Journalism (MS at the Seoul National University). She worked as reporter for the Korea Times, and lectured on editorial strategy at the Journalism Department, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

As journalist, she covered fine arts, education, science and technology, health and labor for the Korea Times in the 1970’s. Since 2011, she has been writing columns on culture and history for the newspaper, the first and oldest English daily in Korea.

Since 2009, she has been president of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (KHEI), a government-endorsed research organization for effective communication and education of knowledge on history and culture in and outside Korea.

For a decade in 1998 – 2008, as president of ConvEx Korea she organized major international conventions and exhibitions, mostly in cultural themes such as libraries, museums and women’s studies.

Since 2010, she has focused on researches on modern history of Korea, especially for 1863 – 1910, when Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897) proclaimed herself the Korean Empire (1897-1910) and then was colonized by Japan in 1910.

During the period 2018-2022, the KHEI team carried out research and translation projects of all UNESCO-inscribed documents related to the National Debt Redemption Movement of 1907-1910 in Korea. It was a national sovereignty campaign to raise funds to pay back foreign funds, coerced on Korea by Japanese advisors posted in the Korean government.

A digital archive based on historical documents of the National Debt Redemption Movement, started first in the city of Daegu in 1907, is not open. In the name of “Daegu 1907”, the story elements such as relational information between historical figures, incidents, places, concepts and organizations are organized into a semantic archive with the relational data imbedded in the database. Users can see the interpretative texts of themes, topics and each nodes and relations among them in a visualized graph on the internet. (http://www.gukchae-archive.org/daegu1907/)