This study advances a digital humanities approach to the historicization of emotion in Korean travel writing of the interwar period by analyzing Korean-language travelogues on Europe serialized in major colonial-period magazines such as Kaebyŏk, Samch’ŏlli, and Pyŏlgŏn’gon during the 1920s–1930s. The primary corpus will be drawn from digitized magazine materials available through the Korean History Database of the National Institute of Korean History, especially its Korean Modern and Contemporary Magazine Materials collection, which provides access to original magazine articles and page images. Focusing on the emotional and affective dimensions of Korean travelers’ encounters with Europe, the study examines how emotions were articulated and mediated through these texts. Produced under Japanese colonial rule, the travelogues were authored by modern intellectuals who occupied a complex and often contradictory positionality: they were simultaneously Asians navigating a Eurocentric global order, colonial subjects living under imperial domination, and participants in an emerging bourgeois public shaped by modern education, print capitalism, and transnational mobility. As such, these narratives constitute a rich corpus for investigating how Europe was emotionally apprehended and negotiated within the structural constraints of colonial modernity.

Existing scholarship on interwar Korean travel writing has largely approached these texts through the lens of imaginative or mental geography, focusing on how Korean intellectuals spatially conceptualized Europe and positioned it within broader civilizational hierarchies (Cha 2004a). Research in this vein has emphasized differences in attitudes toward Western culture (Cha 2009), the internalization or critique of modernization discourse (Cha 2004b), and the formation of the modern intellectual subject through overseas travel (Sung 2012). Other studies have examined these travelogues as sites of colonial self-fashioning, foregrounding experiences of alterity, self-construction, and the representational dynamics through which both Europe and the self were articulated through writing rather than through travel experience alone (Cha 2010; Ha 2022). While these approaches have yielded important insights into the ideological and narrative dimensions of Korean travel writing, the emotional expressions embedded in these texts have often been treated as secondary, subsumed under broader analytical categories such as admiration, critique, or ambivalence.

This study seeks to re-center emotion as a primary object of analysis. Rather than treating emotions as incidental aesthetic responses or rhetorical effects, it approaches them as historically situated and socially mediated practices that actively shape intercultural perception. Drawing on Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’ (Rosenwein 2006), the study conceptualizes Korean travel writers of the interwar period as participants in a shared emotional community whose members mobilized recognizable affective repertoires in their engagements with Europe. Emotions are thus understood not as purely individual psychological states, but as culturally legible and historically conditioned modes of engagement shaped by colonial constraints, transnational imaginaries, and shared discursive conventions within the Korean-language print sphere.

Building further on William Reddy’s concept of ‘emotives’ (Reddy 2001), the study approaches emotional expressions in serialized travelogues not as transparent reflections of inner states, but as historically situated utterances that both articulate and reshape perceptions of Europe. In colonial print culture, such emotive practices allowed feelings associated with mobility, admiration, ambivalence, frustration, and estrangement to be made publicly legible, while remaining constrained by the limits of colonial discourse. Rather than treating periodicals as neutral containers of text, the study approaches them as affective infrastructures that structured the conditions under which emotions were expressed, shared, and interpreted. In this sense, serialized travelogues circulated through magazines that functioned as semi-public arenas of emotional articulation—and, in a limited sense, as what Reddy calls ‘emotional refuges’ (Reddy 2001)—at a time when political expression was tightly regulated, enabling readers to engage vicariously with affective experiences of travel and transnational encounter. From this perspective, the project examines how emotions related to travel and Europe were made available for collective consumption and reflection, while remaining embedded within—and limited by—the structural constraints of colonial modernity.

Methodologically, the paper combines close reading informed by the history of emotions with computational emotion analysis. It adapts the sentence-level emotion classification model associated with the Korean Poetry Emotion Mapping (KPoEM) dataset (Kim et al. 2025), which was developed for Korean literary texts on the basis of human-annotated modern Korean poetry. KPoEM comprises 7,662 labeled entries across 44 fine-grained emotion categories, providing a more differentiated framework than polarity-based sentiment analysis or models limited to a small set of basic emotions. In practical terms, the classifier takes Korean sentences as input and returns multiple emotion labels with probability scores, allowing emotional expression to be modeled as layered rather than as a single fixed category. Since the model was originally developed for poetry, its application to serialized travel prose is treated as an experimental and heuristic procedure: the outputs will be used to identify affectively dense passages and recurring patterns of emotional expression for historically informed close reading, rather than as definitive evidence of emotion. Applying this model to colonial-period travelogues thus opens a way to explore how emotions cluster around particular itineraries, encounters, and narrative scenes while remaining attentive to genre transfer, semantic stability, and historical context.

By foregrounding methodological design and theoretical framing, this paper aims to open dialogue on how computational approaches can contribute to the historicization of emotion in colonial and transnational contexts. It invites discussion on the possibilities and limits of emotion modeling in historical prose, while demonstrating how computational methods can be integrated with conceptually grounded approaches from the history of emotions.

Key Words: History of Emotions; Computational Emotion Analysis; KPoEM Dataset; Transnational Encounters; Modern Korea