ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief history of the hermeneutic tradition in philosophy and literary studies, and relates it to problems of trust, skepticism, and dialogue in contemporary online media. It argues for a revaluation of this tradition in the Humanities. Despite recent theories of literature and culture that claim to move beyond the hermeneutic enterprise, we argue, hermeneutics is central to a range of contemporary practices in digital humanities and literary studies. What is more, it has migrated from a range of approaches in academia to a plethora of practices in online culture at large. Rather than the historical, cultural, or geographical gaps centralized in the canon of hermeneutic thought, today we are faced with a polarization in online culture that takes on ideological and epistemological terms. We argue that hermeneutics today has come to function as a calibration of trust and distrust–of content, of authors, and of platforms. The chapter presents a brief review of existing studies that engage with hermeneutics and the digital and then introduces our own approach: a ‘scaled reading’ of cultural objects, which oscillates from the whole dataset to a sample, describing the circular motion of the hermeneutic circle.
