Kim Hyeon is Professor Emeritus at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) and Distinguished Professor at Dongguk University. A philosopher by training, he is widely recognized as the foundational architect of Digital Humanities in Korea, having devoted four decades to building the infrastructures, institutions, and intellectual frameworks through which humanistic knowledge is digitally preserved, accessed, and disseminated. He defines Digital Humanities as “practical efforts to explore and apply humanistic knowledge in a digital environment”—a deceptively simple formulation that belies the scale and ambition of his career-long project. Before joining AKS, Kim worked at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), where he developed XML-based information retrieval systems and distributed them to humanities institutions across the country. His years in the private sector produced one of his most consequential contributions: the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty Database CD-ROM (1995), the first major digitization of Korea’s classical documentary heritage and a landmark moment in the popularization of humanistic knowledge.

Kim’s work speaks directly to the theme of DH2026, “Engagement.” His career makes a consistent case that Digital Humanities carries a civic responsibility: to make the accumulated knowledge of a civilization genuinely accessible, not only to specialists but to the public at large. At AKS, he established Korea’s first graduate program in Cultural Informatics in 2008, founded the Center for Digital Humanities in 2018, and in 2015 became the founding president of the Korean Association for Digital Humanities (KADH), the country’s primary body for promoting collaboration and academic exchange in the field. His current research centers on Vertical AI for public education—domain-specific AI systems grounded in large-scale humanistic knowledge ontologies developed as part of the “Encyclopedic Archive” or “Encyves” curation model, with projects including the “Encyclopedic Archive of Documentary Cultural Heritage” and the “Hanyang Time Machine Semantic Data Archive.” These efforts represent a vision of AI not as a generic tool but as a culturally situated knowledge infrastructure.

His selected publications include Cultural Informatics (인문정보학의 모색, Book Korea, 2012) and Introduction to Digital Humanities (디지털 인문학 입문, HUEBOOKs, 2016). His broader intellectual project—evident in work ranging from his 2017 Hanyang University conference paper “Global Korean Studies and Digital Humanities” to his 2024 article “Digital Curation: Digital Humanities Education for the Future Generation”—reflects a sustained commitment to expanding both the reach and the audience of Korean humanistic knowledge: equipping the next generation of scholars with digital methods while simultaneously making Korea’s cultural heritage accessible to global audiences through networked, multilingual, and self-directed learning environments.

For more about Kim and his work, please visit Korean Digital Humanities, From ‘Data Digitization’ to ‘The Grand Transformation of Knowledge’: An account of 40 years of pioneering history as told by Professor Hyeon Kim.