When the Present Reads the Past: Critical and Social Literacy Practices as Transformative Uptake in Digital Reader Reviews

Abstract

This study examines how Ryu Si‐min's Appeal Brief (1985)—a courtroom document written by an imprisoned university student under South Korea's authoritarian rule—became available for later civic reading through voluntary public online review writing. Using a qualitatively led convergent mixed‐methods design, the analysis combines sentence‐level rhetorical coding of the source text (ethos, logos, pathos; N  = 184 sentences), directed qualitative content analysis of 752 valid public online reader reviews posted between 2017 and 2025, and corpus‐level latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling for lexical‐thematic calibration across both corpora. Source‐text analysis identified six rhetorical resources—moral witness, official naming and framing, institutional diagnosis, historicization, empathy‐based solidarity, and civic‐affective closure—that organized the legal document as available for reading beyond its original courtroom context. Reader‐review analysis showed that selected readers enacted critical literacy practices (disrupting/deconstructing official narratives, recognizing power relations, and connecting past and present) alongside social literacy practices (forming emotional bonds, reconstructing civic identity, and promoting collective reading or public address). Integration analysis identified an articulation spectrum ranging from preservation and affective registration to explicit civic reworking. Transformative uptake designates the more explicitly civic end of this spectrum, where source‐text resources are reworked through public review writing into civic judgment, civic self‐positioning, or public address. More explicit cases combined critical and social literacy practices, while other cases foregrounded preservation, affective response, or admiration. The findings offer a bounded and transferable analytic approach for studying how historical legal‐political texts become resources for civic reading in digital publics.