Snakes or Ladders? Measuring the Intergenerational Performance of Chosŏn’s Munkwa Exam Candidates

This interdisciplinary study measures the changes in intergenerational exam performance using a model of directed centrality values. Our test case explores the approximately 14,600 higher civil examination degree holders in the Munkwa database (Munkwa pangmok 文科榜目), in particular the underutilized records of each candidate’s agnatic and affinal relations. Despite some imperfections in the data set, our provisional findings statistically demonstrate that the devastating Imjin War may have indeed been the watershed event responsible for the emergence of a new social order in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Korea. The network model, data structure, and the Python code developed for this study can be applied to other kinship and genealogical data from the Chosŏn dynasty 朝鮮 (1392–1910) and elsewhere.