Interfacing Collaborative and Multiple-Layered Spaces of Interpretation in Humanities Research. The Case of Semantically-Enhanced Objective Hermeneutics

In recent years, semantically enhanced Digital Humanities Research has become a widespread topic realized in different environments (e.g. CWRC, Pundit). While semantic graph technologies are mainly used to connect, annotate, query and aggregate strictly formalized entities, there is a lack of interfaces for enhancing acts of interpretations. Annotations are described as crucial in interpretations and are designated as a killer application (Juola, 2009), scholarly primitive (Unsworth, 2000) and considered as notetaking within main scholarly information activities (Palmer, et al. 2009). Concerning an interpretational act, limitations of annotations are identified (overlapping, flexibility), and there is a demand for customization to the research context and an iterative and agile of schema development (Piez, 2010). Drucker indicates the emergent qualities of interpretation, while suggesting an interface which “supports acts of interpretation rather than simply returning selected results from a pre-existing data set” (Drucker, 2013: 37). In this paper, this desideratum is addressed by designing an interface for collaborative and multi-layered spaces of interpretations based on a semantic graph (Suchman, 2007; Drucker, 2011; Rheinberger, 2010; Barad, 2003). A specific style of interpretation is chosen as a case study, i.e. collaborative analysis of face-to-face situations in small groups by creating a multiple layered space of interpretation Objective Hermeneutics. In German-speaking countries, the approach of Objective Hermeneutics is one of the main methodologies used for qualitative analysis (Flick, 2005), which generates deep-structure analyses of cases by reconstructing actions and meanings. Creation of an interface that enables semantic annotations for these acts of interpretations makes it possible to elaborate and explicate a multiple layered space of interpretation. In the following, we describe settings in the interpretational act of Objective Hermeneutics. Furthermore, the background of the design is outlined in relation to methods, design and data. The main contribution is twofold: (i) realization of an interface focusing the semantic enhancement of the collaborative spaces of interpretation and accountability and (ii) examines the semantic explication of the research data (interactional protocols), the interlinked multiple layered annotations and the possibility to retrace the space of interpretation.