ABSTRACT
Collaborative hermeneutics rotates around particular data points (often artefacts such as images, video, audio or text, but also shared sets of questions), bringing diversely positioned people together to read what, putatively, is ‘the same thing’. Collaborative hermeneutics can be focused at different scales and levels of abstraction, rotating around an empirical focus: an artefact, like an image; a place; a person, group or organization; a problem space and its double binds and discursive risks; the paradigms or interpretative frames that we use to make sense of all these. All of these things can be evidenced empirically, then collaboratively questioned, analyzed, interpreted, and transposed into still more questions. First, second, third and even high-order questions are all important. Collaborative hermeneutics isn’t presentist; it is in constant pursuit of more interpretation. Collaborative hermeneutics doesn’t require technical infrastructure but is enabled and animated by it. The design logics of that technical infrastructure matter.
