Digital Hermeneutics
A conceptual framework fordoing history in the digital age
Prof. Dr. Andreas Fickers
21st CODH Seminar Digital History: Concepts & Practices
Centre for Open Data in the Humanities / Tokyo 4th of March 2024

Structure of lecture1) Classical hermeneutics:- where do we stand?
2) Between analogue & digital:- digital hermeneutics as hermeneutics ofin-betweenness
3) Theory & practice:- challenges of a reflexive practice in digital
humanities

The challenge§ To face the growing gap between the fast development of
new techniques and tools for doing digital humanities and therather slow appropriation and critical reflection of such tools
and techniques by the academic community§ The ”update” of classical hermeneutics (Schleiermacher,Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas) to thedigital age requires a thorough investigation on the technical,infrastructural, and digital environment in which we produce
historical evidence, develop historical arguments, andconstruct historical narratives.

Classical hermeneutics§ Hermeneutics is derived from the Greek word ἑρμηνεύω (hermēneuō, = totranslate, interpret; Greek god Hermes = messenger of the gods
§ Early modern history: hermeneutics = the art of interpretation of texts(Bible / protestant tradition of exegesis)§ 19th century: hermeneutics concentrated on the philosophical or
sociological conditions of possibility to produce evidence-based arguments(“truth”, “objectivity”) in order to “understand”, not to “explain”§ Key figure: Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911): differentiation between “naturalsciences” and “humanities” (Geisteswissenschaften):§ Sciences = about explaining the world based on natural laws / empirical findings§ Humanities = about understanding the world based on hermeneutic interpretation§ Philosophical hermeneutics as pragmatic theory of knowledge (Gadamer:
Truth & Method): what can we know, under what circumstances and withwhat validity?

Classical hermeneutics
Central lessons of hermeneutical thinking:§ Absolute historicity of all knowledge(impossibility of absolute truth)§ Contextual condition of situated knowledge
production & appropriation§ Interest driven nature of cognition & insight§ Understanding as a dynamic processDigital hermeneutics§ Tension between “understanding” and “explaining” inDilthey’s conception of hermeneutics resurges in the ageof big data
§ Methodological tensions:§ Tension between ”quantitative” and “qualitative”
research§ Tension between “distant” and “close” reading§ Epistemological challenges:§ Tension between “statistical evidence” and “historicalrelevance”§ Tension between “exemplary” versus “representative”
research designs

Digital hermeneutics
Tension between “strangeness” and “familiarity”:
the in-betweenness is the true space of hermeneutics(Gadamer: Truth & Method)

Digital hermeneutics as “hermeneutics of in-betweenness”§„Trying to locate a hermeneutics at the boundary between
mechanism and theory (...) Algorithmic criticism proposes that wechannel the heightened objectivity made possible by the machine into
the cultivation of those heightened subjectivities necessary for critical
work“.

Stephen Ramsey: Reading Machines. Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Universityof Illinois Press 2011, p. x.

The reflexive wave
• Different “waves“ of digital humanities:– 1st wave: computational humanities wave (driven bysmall community of programming scholars, mainlycomputational linguists)– 2nd wave: big expectations wave (revolutionary
rhetoric of game-changing nature of digitization;
large scale digitization; building of tools / datasets)– 3rd wave: critical / reflexive wave (acknowledging
both the possibilities and limitations or biases)

The reflexive wave
§ Reflexive wave:§ In using software, apps, databases, digital meta-sources, the digital
humanities scholar (the experimenter) actively co-constructs his“epistemic object” (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger)§ Kranzberg law: “Technology is neither good, nor bad, norneutral”.
§ Ergo: we need to reflect on the “non-neutrality” of the technologies /infrastructures involved in our research§ Ergo: we need to open up the “black boxes” we are using in doing ourresearch!

Open up the black boxes§ Open up the black boxes = battle call of Science, Technology &Society Studies (STS)§ “The infrastructures of the digital humanities are, like all the best
infrastructures, simultaneously omnipresent and invisible. The digital
humanities depend on and operate through a vast, interlocked network ofobjects, capital, people, and ideologies: ASCII code; fiber-optic cables; tenurelines; server farms; research centers and literature labs; wage laborers andgraduate students who scan, attach metadata, and program search functions”.
§Jessica Hurley, Aesthetics and the Infrastructural Turn in the Digital Humanities. American Literature 88(2016) 3: 627-637.

New skills & competences•

We need an “update” of classicalhermeneutics to the digital condition ofknowledge production•

We need new skills / competences; first ofall: digital literacy“We need database literacies, algorithmic literacies,
computational literacies, interface literacies. We need
new hybrid practitioners: artist-theorists, programming
humanists, activist-scholars; theoretical archivists,
critical race coders. We need new forms of graduate
and undergraduate education that hone both criticaland digital literacies. We have to shake ourselves out of
our small, field-based boxes so that we might takeseriously the possibility that our own knowledge
practices are normalized, modular, and black boxed inmuch the same way as the code we study in our work.”
Tara McPherson, ‘U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwinning of Raceand UNIX’, in L. Nakamura and P. Chow- White (eds.), Race after the Internet (NewYork: Routledge, 2012), p. 35.

Against analogue / digital divide
Hybridity is “the new normal”“The current challenge facing the discipline of history is not in creating everbigger sets of data and developing new tools, important as these are. The real
challenge is to be consciously hybrid and to integrate ‘traditional’ approaches
in a new practice of doing history”.
Gerben Zaagsma: ‘On digital history’, BMGN / Low Countries Historical Review
128 (2013) 4, p. 17.

Digital Hermeneutics = where the ”raw” is transformed into the“cooked”- Frisch, Michael, “From ‘A Shared Authority’ to the Digital Kitchen, andBack.” In Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User Generated
World, ed. by Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski (London:Routledge 2011), pp. 126-137.

Thinkering§ Digital history / humanities means „thinkering“ at alllevels / steps in a research process:– During the development of new questions;– During „harvesting“ / retrieval of information / data;– During “cleaning“ / „curation“ of data
– During analysis, visualization and re-contextualization– During narrating / arguing in different genres / formats ofstorytelling

Hermeneutics of in-betweennessNew skills & multimodal literacy– Searching:– Documenting:– Analysing:– Presenting:– Narrating:algorithmic criticism
data criticism
tool criticism
interface criticism
simulation criticism

algorithmic criticism§ “Age of abundance” (Roy Rosenzweig) / “big data” asks for a new
heuristics of search and a basic understanding of mechanisms of
information retrieval (search algorithms and metadata schemes)§ Search engines aren‘t neutral! They don‘t “search” for information, they
co-produce them. They generate implicit and explicit ratings (ranking);
often we don‘t search but „browse“§ We need a basic understanding in statistics and modern principles of“deep” or “machine learning” (data ontologies / metadata standards)§ Digitialisation changes the control zone of classical archives / libraries:changes power relations between users / owners of information assets
and shifts competences from institutions to users (provincial research /data integrity / information management)§ Need a new „ethics of the algorithm“§ Todd Presner: ‘The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the ShoahFoundation Visual History Archive, in: History Unlimited: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust
Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

§ Algorithms increasingly determine our historical imagination;§ Ed Finn: What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing. MIT Press 2017.

data criticism
••
•
•
•

Change from "source" to "document" to "data" changes ontological statusof historical sources
Digitisation as a process of coding and recoding changes indexicality(relationship between representation and historical reality)"Raw data is an oxymoron": classical concepts of "original" and"authenticity" are obsolete
Source criticism must be expanded to include questions of information
technology data integrity and presentation integrity
Digital source criticism must deal with the entire "life cycle" of metasources (Genet): "creation, enrichment, editing, retrieval, analysis,presentation" (historicity of hardware and software)

Digitale Hermeneutik und Geschichtswissenschaft

tool criticism§ We use tools for searching, selection, storage, analysis,interpretation, visualization of sources / information§ Software / databases / infrastructures / apps etc. co-construct
our "epistemic objects" (H.-J. Rheinberger)§ Quality of software (scanning & OCR) and metadata have a great
influence on the "findability" of search terms / semantic units§ Software-based tools (text-mining, deep learning algorithms,visualization) are "biased" / have their own "ground truth"; training
the software bears the danger of "self-fulfilling prophecies§ Compression standards of text / audio / video; "rendering &simulation software" influences the "indexical relationship" between"original" and "copy§ Simulation / 3D scanning: changing our historical imagination andrelationship between physical and virtual reality / interaction withmateriality of historical sourcesinterface criticism
Increasingly complex visualization of our data / research results asks for a
critical reflection of the “visual evidence” / “screen reality” of the“appresentation” (Karin Knorr-Cetina) of our knowledge§ We need a better understanding of the interplay between the “commoditylayer” and the “mechanism layer” (David Berry) of interfaces(understanding of the complex relationship between “front-end” and“back-end”)§ Graphs and tables give statistical information a “look of certainty”§ “Paradoxically, the primary effect of visual forms of knowledge production
in any medium – the codex book, digital interface, information
visualizations, virtual renderings, or screen plays – is to mask the very factof their visuality, to render invisible the very means through which theyfunction as argument”.
•§ Johanna Drucker, Graphesis. Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Harvard UniversityPress (2014).

simulation criticism•••Production of database histories (“histories comprised of not narratives
that describe an experience of the past but rather collections of infinitely
retrievable fragments, situated within categories and organized according
to predetermined associations” / Steve Anderson: Technologies of history.
Dartmouth College Press 2011, p. 122) means that historians understandthe ”codes" and ”conventions" of digital representations of the past
Problem of “representational integrity” of websites as historical sources:
the dynamic and relational nature of websites make archived websites a”reborn digital medium” (Niels Brügger);
LLM and generative AI: problem of “dual-decontextualization”: loss ofhistorical context and loss of data context; risks and realities of extending
power imbalances, and amplifying racial, gender, and ableist biases; howto train students in analysis of “fake facts” and fight misinformation.

How to inscribe digital hermeneutics into
research infrastructures & tools?
Example 1: Impresso
Collaboration between EPFL / University of
Zurich / C2DH in the framework of Sinergia(SNF)•Making sense of “big data of the past“:–––––••

76 newspaper (Lux and CH)
600.919 issues
5.429.656 pages scanned
3.4 Mio images / 12.5 billion words
530 named entities disambiguatedTransparent scalable reading
Explore the App interface:https://impresso-project.ch/app/

Visualize interferences in the co-constructionof epistemic object

Scalable ReadingTransparency: visualizing gaps

Example 2: The Journal of Digital History
https://journalofdigitalhistory.org

Making the implicit explicit: transparency & traceability

Example 3: DHARPA
Sean Takats / PEARL project Digital History
Advanced Research Projects Accelerator
A Virtual Research Environment (VRE)based on a modular design, allowing users
to build and rebuild, run and rerun theirown workflows
Modules include functionalities for- data ingestion- data standardization- data analysis- network analysis- geographical analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L1V20Ncey8“The VRE will also be equipped with essential features for documenting the user’s research
process and tracing all the transformations which their data undergo, allowing thehistorian to write a self-reflexive meta-history of their relationship with their sources
through the software.” https://journal.dhbenelux.org/journal/issues/004/article-2-Cunningham.pdf

C2DH as laboratory of digital hermeneutics§ How to turn “theory” of a “trading zone” between humanities andcomputer science / data science into practice?
§ How to promote / realize “interactional expertise” as homogeneousand collaborative practice?

C2DH as “Trading Zone”: TZ-InitiativeC2DH as “Trading Zone”: PhD researchC2DH as “Trading Zone”: Doctoral Training Unit

Challenges & opportunities
SDHH
2The series Digital History and Hermeneutics offers a platform for cuttingedge scholarship in the emerging field of digital history and hermeneutics.
It aims at making a critical intervention in the field of digital humanities
and introduces key debates and concepts of digital history to the historicalcommunity at large. The series is edited by Andreas Fickers, Valérie Schafer,
Sean Takats, and Gerben Zaagsma.

DIGITAL HISTORY AND HERMENEUTICS

THE SERIES: STUDIES IN DIGITAL HISTORY AND HERMENEUTICS

Edited by Andreas Fickers and Juliane Tatarinov

For doing history in the digital age, we need to investigate the “digitalkitchen” as the place where the “raw” is transformed into the “cooked”.
Based on the experiences of PhD students involved in the Doctoral Training
Unit “Digital History and Hermeneutics” hosted at the Luxembourg Centrefor Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), the book offers first handaccounts of how the concept of digital hermeneutics can serve as a criticaland reflexive framework for doing digital humanities research in an interdisciplinary fashion.

DIGITALHISTORY ANDHERMENEUTICS!!BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Edited by Andreas Fickers
and Juliane Tatarinov

STUDIES IN DIGITAL HISTORYAND HERMENEUTICS

www.degruyter.com
ISBN 978-3-11-072387-8
ISSN 2629-4540Current DTU

Exploring big data of the past
Training in historical data critcism
LuxTIME: deep history &multi-layered temporalities

Enabling New Encounters!
– ”De/form/ation” (Steven Ramsey) is thekey epistemological function of digital
humanities; it invites new questions andopens up new analytical perspectives.
– “In deforming text, in taking it out of its
otherwise self-enclosed framing, thedatabase, the file, et cetera, we expose
various dimensions and resources to thepresent. These new encounters canproduce dramatic reinterpretations ofthe past and enable interruptive or
disruptive encounters in the present”.
• James E. Dobson, Critical Digital Humanities. The
Search for a Methodology (University of Illinois
Press 2019), hier Kap. 3: Digital Historicism andthe Historicity of Digital Texts), p. 82f.

Thank you very much for your attention!