This paper centers on how to deal with Sino-Xenic resources, or Sino-Korean texts of traditional Korean philosophy and religions from a perspective of Digital Humanities. Although philosophy including religious thought is at the center of pre-modern Korean Studies, the core contents have not been explored or re-organized from a perspective of Digital Humanities. However, the philosophical circle in Korea has not yet had a serious discussion about the DH circumstance where Sino-Korean philosophical resources are left behind. This paper discusses the feasibility of adapting traditional Sino-Korean philosophical resources to Digital Humanities and the conditions for the adaptation. And for a concrete and practical discussion, this paper will show an experimental DH analysis and visualization of some Sino-Korean philosophical texts and diagrams. And at the end, I will emphasize that the core of DH is humanistic activities rather than tech-oriented activities.

This article discusses the nature of Korean classical Chinese texts, or Sino-Korean texts and pays attention to the need for compiling various reference works in pre-modern Korean studies. And it suggests that the introduction of Digital Humanities to the field is necessary and discusses the conditions for successful Digital Humanities in the field. Due to the ambiguity and complexity of Sino-Korean texts, students of the field need various reference works to refer to for a clear understanding of the texts. It is recently and widely accepted as an urgent task to compile various reference works for Korean studies, ranging from linguistic and term dictionaries to encyclopedias. However, since the number of people who want to use paper dictionaries and reference books continues to reduce, reference work projects for Korean studies need to consider changing the direction. Adopting the Digital Humanities methods in the whole process of the projects can bring promptness, accuracy, and up-to-date-ness to the projects, and enable the field to extend the territory and maximize versatility. In doing so, the projects of reference work for Korean studies can continue to contribute to the development of Korean studies. It can also be used as a useful cultural content on the Internet. There are two issues to take into consideration regarding adopting Digital Humanities for reference work making for Korean studies. One is fostering editors and project managers of Digital Humanities projects for Korean studies; the other is to establish a standard for reference work making projects for effective communication, project planning & evaluation, and manpower training, etc.