Prospects for Computational Hermeneutics

The central concern of the humanities is the understanding of human artifacts. This goal requires interpretation and makes hermeneutics a core element of their methodology. So far, the digital humanities have been mostly concerned with providing tools that either support human interpretation or that permit scholars to record results of their interpretation through annotation. However, if we understand digital humanities as the construction of formal models in the humanities, we must also strive to integrate hermeneutics into these models. In this paper, we reflect on the role of hermeneutics in digital humanities and sketch an approach for combining human interpretation with formal models