Abstract

This study examines how human rights discourse has been established in South Korea from 1990 to 2010, focusing on who talks about what, and how those themes are connected or not over time. By representing a novel corpus incorporating these stakeholders’ human rights-related texts as topics based on semantic similarities, this study accounts for Korean human rights discourse as a result of how the stakeholders did or did not connect topics that vary in drift (i.e., how a similar theme is framed via different vocabularies) and span (i.e., how long the topics remain active in focus). Korean human rights discourse is largely characterized by the persistence of topics, regardless of whether their vocabulary is stabilized or continuously evolving. Each stakeholder shows a distinct style of bridging topics with different drift-span indexes over time. Topics with similar levels of drift and span are bridged predominantly, and it is less likely for topics whose drift-span indexes are different to appear together in a single document. However, when semantic similarities are considered, it becomes clearer that enduring topics with low drift consist of core themes, and topics that are similarly persistent with high drift play an important bridging role.