Digital Culture and the Hermeneutic Tradition

I am not aware of another book that makes as strong and well-founded a claim for the relevance of humanistic thought on discussions of digital disinformation and bias usually dominated by social scientists, computer scientists, and journalists. A very original work that brings the long history of European hermeneutical thought to bear on online trust, skepticism, and dialogue in today’s “platform hermeneutics.” And the book is great fun too in its inventive use of AI and machine learning to analyze case studies on Tumblr, Reddit, and elsewhere. Alan Liu, Distinguished Professor, University of California Santa Barbara, USA In the world of digital communication, researchers - and ordinary users alike - have to deal with a situation of information overload. The abundance of data is certaintly a great opportunity for in-depth knowledge of social processes, but the risk of “drowning” in it, is ever-present. This insightful book by Inge van de Ven and Lucie Chateau discusses how scholars of digital culture and society can extricate themselves from this information abundance trap, by recuperating the hermeneutic tradition of close reading, qualitative analysis and in-depth interpretation, and deploying it to address the new materials of contempoary digital culture: tweets, online videos, internet memes, conversations of all sorts. A recommended reading for those searching for methods to understand the symbolisms and meanings of contemporary digital cultures. Paolo Gerbaudo, Senior Researcher in Social Science, Complutense University in Madrid, Spain