Home on Hermeneutic AI

News Monitor

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Monitor is the lab’s live reading room — a running dashboard that follows several streams at once: developments in artificial intelligence, in space, in technology, and across the left and right of political discourse, watching how each is framed and reframed over time.

Audio Briefings

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Audio Briefings are AI-produced podcasts built on the News Monitor’s feeds — hand-crafted selection criteria and scriptwriting turn the day’s monitoring into a short, listenable briefing. The five most recent episodes of each show are below; subscribe on Spotify or YouTube to follow along.

Academic Journal Monitor

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Academic Journal Monitor is a live dashboard that tracks new work across a curated set of some seventy-five scholarly journals in sociology, criminology, political economy, social theory, anthropology, and political science.

Academic Article/Book Reader

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Academic Article/Book Reader is tool under development for reading long-form scholarship closely and at scale: it captures articles’ and book monographs’ central arguments, summarising their moves, and extracting the key points a reader needs to orient quickly.

Network Analyzer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Network Analyzer is a tool under development for mapping social networks as sociologists and anthropologists actually encounter them: as people affiliated with venues — editorial boards, think tanks, committees, conferences, meetings. Messy source material (a pasted masthead, a committee roster, a spreadsheet of appointments) is turned into structured relational data through AI-assisted entry and clean-up, and the resulting network is explored through interactive visualization: bipartite people–venue graphs, co-membership projections, community detection, and centrality rankings that surface the brokers and cross-members who hold a field together.

AI and Authenticity

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In recent months we’ve seen a wider debate over the use of AI in both academic research and among students pursuing higher education. But much anti-AI positioning seems to rely on its weakest argument. Yes, there are legitimate questions about veracity — about truthfulness, accuracy, and hallucinations — and about deskilling, particularly with regard to students. But the least convincing claim on the anti-AI side is that of authenticity, because authenticity is such a deeply problematic category. We’re never simply authentic; Adorno taught us that in the 1960s in The Jargon of Authenticity. We’re always-already embedded in a social order, which means we benefit from or are disadvantaged by the social relations that we find ourselves caught up in. We’re enmeshed in a social fabric that punishes or rewards us, conferring unfair advantages or disadvantages, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed out over decades of research. There is, therefore, no natural, spontaneous self with which we can authentically be in communication. We’re augmented or disadvantaged by the mere fact of being social beings or products of societies.

What Is Hermeneutic AI?

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hermeneutics is the discipline of interpretation: the art and theory of understanding texts, actions, and forms of life. It runs from the exegesis of scripture through philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer to the interpretive turn in the social sciences — the insistence, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, that the study of culture is “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hermeneutic AI is a social science research lab devoted to interpretive artificial intelligence.

We start from a simple observation: the qualitative disciplines — sociology, anthropology, geography, philosophy, history, and their neighbors in the social sciences and humanities — have been largely spectators to the current wave of rapid developments in artificial intelligence, which speak the language of prediction, quantitative measurement, and benchmark. Yet these AI systems are trained on text, culture, human insight, and conversation: the very materials interpretive scholars have spent more than a century analysing and writing about.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

We are glad to hear from researchers, students, and practitioners interested in interpretive artificial intelligence — whether about our tools, a research note, or a possible collaboration.

Email: contact@hrmn.ai