ABSTRACT
The functional aspect of texts of major concern is that of their meaning, and the question motivating my deliberations is how digital humanities might facilitate a collaborative markup approach in textual interpretation. Since Schleiermacher, the psychological, cultural and historical contextualization of texts and their interpretations is generally seen as the fundamental methodological condition and insurmountable boundary of all hermeneutical activity. The idea of a computationally supported collaborative interpretation of complex texts may have seemed rather futuristic in those days; the idea of an automated interpretation of short utterances and in particular of machine translation (MT), however, was not. Productive prejudices are enablers for new ways of interpretation and understanding, whereas false prejudices are hermetic and terminate the process of exploration. In this regard, the methodological issue of major concern to literary history and analysis is how to distinguish 'true' prejudices, that is, meaning-productive markup, from 'false' markup prejudices that will prematurely terminate our interpretive process.
