All Tomorrow's Cultures

In Korean SF, the Internet has been important from the 1990s, with a lot of writers serializing their work online before landing themselves book contracts.  But the importance of Internet platforms extends beyond print to a variety of multimedia, and I have also been considering webtoon representations of Seoul.  Here are a couple: 1). 일호선 (이은재).  (Line 1).  The usual zombie-love story, with a mysterious plague turning most of Seoul's residents into flesh-eating zombies.  You know the drill. 2). 레테 (Lethe).  강도하.   Imagining the afterlife as existing as a shadow in Seoul's 서촌 neighborhood.

One of my projects in Seoul this year has been collecting representations of the city in Korean science fiction.  Even if we exclude (for the moment) cinema, that still leaves a lot of interesting work that represents the city (and, by default, Seoul).  This project has been immeasurably helped by an incredible resource in Seoul: the Science Fiction a (SF & 판타지 도서관).  Here's what I've been working on in chronological order: 1). 문윤성.  완전사회 (1967).  Yun-seong Mun.  The Perfect Society. 2). 강경옥.  노말 시티 (1993-).  Gyeong-ok Gang. Normal City. 3).  윤태호.  야후 (1999).  Tae-ho Yun.  Yahoo. 4). 배명훈.  타워 (2009).  Myeong-hun Bae.  Tower. 5). 김이환.  절망의 구 (2009).  I-hwan Kim.  The Orb of Despair. 6). 김이환.  동네전쟁 (2011).  I-hwan Kim.  Neighborhood War. I think we can all agree that this is a quirky list, one that is shaped by the interesting history of SF in Ko...

I did this for the American Anthropological Association last month. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A9VDFYemg8

Small Big Data? Of the many hyperbolic predictions in bestselling books devoted to big data, none is more astounding than  Mayer-Schönberger’s and Cukier’s  claims that big data will eliminate the need for sampling (why sample when you’ve got all the data?). But here’s the thing. We don’t have all of the data. Let’s look at Twitter. First, people who tweet are not a representative sample of the population. Second, like most commercial platforms, Twitter has moved towards more proprietary policies on the data they have mined from us. Most of us can only access up to 1% of relevant tweets for a given query. That can still be a lot of tweets, and that data is, for the moment, free.  But is that big data?  In other words, we’ve got sampling bias. If you can detect it, though, you can correct for it— Morstatter et al  recommend bootstrapping the data in order to correct for the biased sample. But it may not be so easy with some of the work we do. For example, t...

Moving Across Scale and Platform in Seoul Walker, Rider, Smartphone Talker In Ryu Shin’s 2014  Seoul Arcade Project,  the author, in the persona of the “walker” (구보), explores Seoul through Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” focusing on the phantasmagoria of Korean capitalism and spectacle over the course of a day’s travel from Gangnam to Gangbuk and back again.  That said, there are some significant differences between Ryu’s project and Benjamin’s, notably in the presence of two technologies altogether absent from Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece: the smart phone and the subway. More than just communication and travel, Ryu’s subway and smartphone combination fuels his narrator’s journey across multiple forms of transit to Seoul’s diverse spaces.  Here, the project is a renewed call for analyses of urban mobility systems, but not only that—it’s a call to look into the ways urban practice involves this assemblage of movement, technology and communication.  Th...

Here's my 2009 review essay for Science Fiction Studies on some interesting secondary scholarship on Ursula K. Le Guin.  

Congrats to Samuel Gerald Collins for winning the 2014 Battisti Award for best article in 'Utopian Studies' (2013, 24:1)! #susmtl14 — SUS (@utopianstudies) October 25, 2014 Goes to an article I published in Utopian Studies: Train to Pyongyang: Imagination, Utopia, and Korean Unification Samuel Gerald Collins From:  Utopian Studies Volume 24, Number 1, 2013 pp. 119-143 | 10.1353/utp.2013.0013 Abstract Abstract: This essay is motivated by the seeming contradiction that Korean unification is sought after by most Koreans yet speculations about the social and cultural changes it might bring are almost absent. This may be because Korean unification denotes a series of differences contrasted to the present—because it is a potent “master symbol” with one foot in utopian speculation and the other in policy studies. In this essay, I outline some of the complexities, starting with an examination of illustrations of unification in textbooks for the tensions and co...