The 1980s in South Korea are commonly characterized as a period of authoritarian rule, during which student movements constituted a major form of social and political activity. Within universities, student nongak (pungmul), a form of traditional Korean percussion performance historically associated with collective labor and communal gathering, was closely connected to protest culture and student activism in 1980s South Korea. Beyond performance, pungmul was frequently used in demonstrations and collective gatherings, where rhythm and coordinated movement supported group participation and visibility. This study examines a set of collective diaries written by members of Godae Nongakdae, the student nongak group of Korea University, offering a student-authored and collectively produced record of everyday life, political practice, and interpersonal experience during this period.

The dataset consists of 34 handwritten diary volumes covering nearly ten years, from March 10, 1980 to October 28, 1989. Each volume was written collaboratively, with an average of at least 21 contributors per volume (minimum 10, maximum 41). The diaries include accounts of political events and collective activities, as well as reflections on interpersonal relationships, emotional states, and everyday life. As the diaries were written at the time and not for official purposes, they differ from institutional records or later recollections and provide direct access to how students described their own activities and concerns.

The primary aim of this study is to digitize the diary collection and construct a digital archive suitable for systematic analysis. Handwritten entries were manually transcribed while largely preserving the original orthography and expression of the period, and annotated with basic metadata, such as the date, the volume number, and the number of contributors. This structure makes it possible to examine the texts both over time and as a form of collective writing produced by many authors. In addition, the archive is designed so that the data can be reused in future research.

The study uses a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative analysis is used to examine the frequency and distribution of content words, which serves as a starting point for identifying repeated themes. These patterns are then examined through qualitative reading. Instead of treating quantitative and qualitative methods as separate steps, the study uses frequency patterns as an empirical basis for interpretation.

Preliminary analysis identifies three broad tendencies in the data. First, frequently occurring words such as human, person, thought, self, love, mind, and life point to a sustained concern with self-reflection and questions of living and acting under restrictive conditions. Second, the prominence of terms such as nongakdae, senior, peer, junior, and member highlights the importance of group relations and shared identity within the collective. Third, words including movement, world, power, effort, history, liberation, action, nation, struggle, and practice show repeated attention to political action and historical concerns, as expressed in accounts of everyday activities.

By focusing on student-authored collective diaries, this study applies exploratory corpus-based analysis to a dataset that has received little attention from corpus-based approaches. The contribution of the study lies in showing how recurring lexical patterns and their distribution over time can be used to identify shared concerns and discursive tendencies in collective student writing, providing an empirical foundation for qualitative interpretation.

Future research will extend the archive through time-series analysis and topic modeling in order to examine shifts in thematic emphasis across the decade. More broadly, the project demonstrates the value of digitized collective student archives as reusable resources for linguistic, historical, and digital humanities research.