The representation of Korean culture by way of cultural translation and saleable diversity in Kim’s convenience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada has recently seen a flourishing of television shows centering on the lives of different minority groups.Kim's Convenience gained immense popularity since its inception in 2016, followed by international success two years later.The news of the show ending after its fifth season in 2021 came as a surprise to many as renewal for the sixth season had already been announced.Soon after this, members of the main cast began speaking out about their experiences of working on set, detailing their treatment, disinclusion in character development and lack of diversity in the writers' room.This raised a question whether the representation of Koreans in Kim's Convenience deserved the praise the show was receiving.The present thesis aims to analyse the television series in the framework of Kyle Conway's terms of 'cultural translation' and 'saleable diversity' and how the excessive implementation of the 'saleable diversity' strategy without concern for cultural accuracy caused the partial misrepresentation of Korean culture in Kim's Convenience.The thesis consists of an introduction, a literature review, an empirical analysis of the television series, and a conclusion.The introduction gives the necessary background information on Koreans in Canada and a synopsis of Kim's Convenience as a play and a television series.It also defines the key terms in the thesis -Conway's 'cultural translation,' 'saleable diversity,' and Hamamoto's 'controlling images.'The literature review outlines some of the reception of the original play that the series is based on in terms of its relevance to the analysis of the television series.It also discusses the reception of the television series.The empirical part of the thesis provides a thematic analysis of Season Three through Season Five of the show.The analysis has been divided into two parts according to the main themes of Perpetual Other and Heterogenous Koreans: Diversity Within, derived from Sherry S. Yu.The conclusion summarises the main findings of the thesis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".