KJCKorea
Journal Central

This article critically examines the reconfiguration of archives as political and ethical spaces through decolonial practices. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of archival power and Stoler’s analysis of the colonial archive, it develops an analytical framework structured around three key dimensions: memory sovereignty, institutional repair, and digital ethics. This framework is employed in the analysis of two case studies: the South African History Archive (SAHA) and the Blackivists. The findings demonstrate that SAHA transforms marginalized memories into public records through strategic engagement with public record systems and institutional interventions, while the Blackivists address issues of memory ownership and control through community-driven record production and digital ethical practices. Despite differing strategies, both cases share the objective of restoring marginalized histories and reconfiguring archival authority. This article argues that decolonizing archives requires not only institutional reform but also a fundamental reconceptualization of memory sovereignty, ethics, and participatory practices, with broader implications for archival discourse and practice in Korea.

This study aims to diagnose the current management system of division-level archives in the Republic of Korea Army and propose an integrated management plan centered on corps-level echelons to enhance the efficiency and expertise of Army archives management. To this end, the study employed literature review and case study methods and empirically analyzed field conditions and perceptions regarding the integrated management of Army archives through surveys and interviews conducted with Army records management specialists and practitioners. Four improvement measures are proposed for the integrated management of Army archives. First, with respect to organizational management, existing division-level archives should be reorganized into corps-level integrated archives that reflect regional and operational characteristics, and be reconstituted under the direct control of the Army Archival Information Management Group as an independent body to ensure administrative and functional control. Second, in the aspect of personnel management, the expertise of records management specialists should be enhanced through their concentrated deployment to each integrated archive, thereby ensuring continuity of duties. Third, in terms of facilities and infrastructure, dedicated standalone preservation buildings should be secured, and the stability of physical preservation environments should be strengthened. Fourth, implementation should proceed sequentially through a phased advancement strategy that follows systematic processes. The study findings may serve as foundational data for future policy formulation and organization restructuring of Army records management.

This study investigates the efficacy of ontology-based search reranking that incorporates the producer’s cognitive dispositions and value systems within a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS). Grounded in the archival principle of provenance, the study hypothesizes that integrating a producer’s cognitive patterns and value systems can enhance the relevance of search results in personal records. To test this, POR (ver. 1.0–2.1.0), a system that reranks Gemini File Search RAG results using seven ontology scoring factors—hub boost, identity lens matching, cross-domain intersection, thinking pattern boost, graph proximity, value alignment, and authorship—was developed. The system was assessed on 3,702 markdown-based PKM notes, constructing a knowledge graph with 5,717 nodes and 13,544 edges, including 1,810 auto-linked HUB_CONNECTION edges. All 10 hub notes ranked within the top 15 by PageRank, supporting the validity of the hub selection methodology. In a live A/B comparison with 10 queries across 5 types, ontology-based reranking changed an average of 4.4 out of 10 positions, with a mean Kendall’s tau of 0.621 (SD = 0.252). Hub-related queries showed the largest reranking (tau = 0.300), while general queries preserved existing rankings (tau = 0.786). Identity lens matching (57 activations) and cross-domain intersection (29 activations) were the most frequently activated factors. These results demonstrate that personal ontology modeling provides contextual relevance beyond what embedding-based semantic similarity alone can achieve, with effectiveness varying by query type.