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Hermeneutica : computer-assisted interpretation in the humanities
Rockwell G., Sinclair S., The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016. 256 pp. Type: Book (978-0-262034-35-7)
Date Reviewed: Oct 26 2016

For decades, scholars in the humanities have danced around the computer like moths drawn to a flame--fascinated by a brightness that they do not fully understand, yet sometimes seduced into abandoning excellence in interpretation for mediocre engineering. For over two decades, the first author of this volume, a philosopher by training, has engaged in this perilous process, exploring different ways that computers can advance the humanistic agenda without coopting it. This volume discusses the critical scholarly issues in the context of a particular set of tools that he and his colleagues have developed, Voyant (voyant-tools.org), openly available for public use.

The core model of scholarly thought that guides the book is dialog, the focus of Rockwell’s 1997 Toronto PhD. The book begins by recalling the problem posed by Descartes in his Discourse on method and the approach he took, which was essentially a dialog with himself. The central thesis of Hermeneutica is that a reader’s dialog with the text, as well as with herself and other readers about text, can be enhanced by embedding computer-driven visualizations in the text. The authors call these visualizations “hermeneutica.” (The authors use the term only in the Latinized plural, and never provide a singular; do they mean to suggest that one should always take multiple perspectives on the text?) The toolset includes 21 different visualizations, variously emphasizing the prominence of different words in the text, their sequential distribution, their collocation in a single text or across different texts in a corpus, and the linkages among named entities; they are implemented in a way that allows them to be embedded within the exposition of a text so that readers can play with them in exploring the text and its interpretation.

The book’s purpose is to explore how interactive visualizations can support the interpretative agenda, not to explain how the visualizations themselves are computed. Some very sophisticated software engineering has gone into the system, but even the website provides little detail into the underlying algorithms employed. The perspective taken in the book is that the computational methods are secondary; the visualizations “bear [carry]” the interpretation of the text, in and of themselves. Readers with a background in scientific data analytics will find this gap frustrating. One can legitimately ask how we are to understand, let alone evaluate, a picture derived from the text if we are not told how it is computed. But perhaps this is the price one pays for keeping the moth out of the flame.

The first chapter motivates hermeneutica as extending Decartes’ self-dialog as one engages with a text, and sets forth the agenda of agile hermeneutics, a rapid iteration of exploratory computation and interpretive thought. It introduces methodological issues that are explored in later chapters. Chapter 2, the most technical in the book, gives some background on how computers process text, the nature of encoding systems and pattern matching, and some historical background on concordance preparation, an early application of computers to humanistic study. Chapter 3 extends the history through predecessors of Voyant.

Beginning with chapter 4, the book alternates between examples of applying hermeneutics to actual texts, and methodological discussions. The book’s website (http://hermeneuti.ca) includes interactive versions of the four example analyses, in which the reader can play with the visualizations to explore the interpretations being offered. These interludes study the archives of the Humanist email discussion list from 1987 to 2008 (chapter 4), a comparison of speeches on race by Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright (chapter 6), 11 years of the journal Game Studies (chapter 8), and Hume’s Dialogues concerning natural religion (chapter 10). The intervening chapters engage the impact of computer widgets on the rhetoric of text analysis (chapter 5), dangers in turning the computer loose on bodies of text larger than the reader can hold in his mind at once (chapter 7), and development of an overall model for using hermeneutica in interpretive thinking (chapter 9). The final chapter reviews the overall pattern of humanistic research, including wide browsing to discover an interesting topic, gathering materials for a specific topic, writing and thinking, and finally sharing and publishing, and argues for the contribution that agile hermeneutics can make to this entire cycle.

The authors’ vision of an interactive mash-up of texts and interpretive tools is compelling, and if the lack of technical detail is frustrating to the engineer, it makes the book more accessible to the humanist, who is after all the intended audience. But digital humanities is possible only because of interaction between scholars in the liberal arts and researchers in science and engineering. One hopes that the authors will provide more detailed technical documentation of their methods, perhaps on the Voyant website, to enable a deeper engagement with their engineering brethren.

Reviewer:  H. Van Dyke Parunak Review #: CR144872 (1701-0035)
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