Controversy over A Thousand Years of Jeolla-do History and the “Colonial Historiography” Frame: Regional Identity and the Conflict over Historical Narratives - Focusing on an Analysis of Media Discourse -

This study examines how the discourse of “colonial historiography” surrounding A Thousand Years of Jeolla-do History was constructed and disseminated in South Korean media between 2022 and 2025, and explores the implications of this discourse structure for regional identity, historical narratives, and history education. To this end, topic modeling was first conducted on 118 academic articles related to colonial historiography in order to identify major trends in scholarly research. The analysis shows that earlier studies focused primarily on source criticism, positivism, and the formation of nationalist historiography, and gradually developed into critical examinations of the structural dimensions of colonialism, including institutions, culture, education, and knowledge systems. This finding suggests that the media usage of the term “colonial historiography” in the Jeolla-do History controversy is not substantively aligned with its academic meaning. Subsequently, LDA-based topic modeling and network centrality analysis were applied to 629 media articles related to the controversy. The results reveal that media discourse repeatedly reproduced a fixed framing chain “colonial historiography‒Nihon Shoki ‒historical distortion-disposal.” The near-identical composition of high-frequency keywords across topics indicates the formation of a hegemonic discourse structure that constrained discursive diversity and prioritized political and identity-based mobilization over factual verification and academic debate. Actor network analysis further demonstrates that civic groups accounted for 25% of all utterances and politicians for 22%, whereas members of the compilation committee appeared as direct speakers in only 9% of the discourse. This suggests that the actual authors of A Thousand Years of Jeolla-do History were marginalized, while a combined network of civic groups, media, and politicians effectively dominated frame production. This network stabilized the controversy through the repeated reproduction of a pressure-driven sequence of “demolition demands-criminal accusations-political pressure.” Based on these findings, this study proposes two implications for history education. First, it underscores the need for media literacy-based history education to address the politicization and popularization of “colonial historiography,” which has repeatedly undermined its academic meaning. Second, it emphasizes that public historical projects, such as regional history compilations, should be grounded in democratic processes involving multiple actors rather than dominated by a single framing group. These implications point toward a vision of history education that goes beyond knowledge transmission and fosters civic capacities for participation in the public sphere. This study contributes to the literature by empirically demonstrating how an academic historical concept is redefined and reorganized as a political discourse in contemporary media environments, and by highlighting the need for interdisciplinary approaches to history education at the intersection of regional history, public history, and media studies.