VISUAL ANALYTICS FOR THE MARRIAGE NETWORK IN THE GORYEO DYNASTY, Korea

Abstract

Political marriage has been a historically productive and important matter to maintain or extend social power. This kind of relationship is also found in Korean history. For instance, in the history of the Goryeo dynasty (i.e., AD 918~ 1392 in Korea), the royal families of the Goryeo dynasty used marriage as a political strategy to maintain or extend their power. Qualitative studies have found that royal families used marriage as a means of maintaining political power, but there is still a lack of quantitative research supporting the outcomes of these studies. For this reason, we adopt computational approaches to advance our understanding of the role of political marriage in the Goryeo dynasty, in Korea. In addition, to simulate the change of power by their origin (i.e., region), we made a visualization system to explore the marriage network of royal families. We note two major findings of this current study. First, the marriage strategies of royal families are divided into three types: (1) exogamous marriages, (2) endogamous marriages, and (3) the combination of exogamous marriages and endogamous marriages. The royal family of Goryeo expanded their external relationship through exogamous marriages and reproduced their power through intra-family marriages. Second, we found that the power of a region was greater when the king was born through wedlock in that region, as opposed to when many marriages were made with the royal family. As a whole, the success of our computational approaches adds to the quantitative evidence for the historical strategies of political marriage in the Goryeo dynasty, in Korea.