Paper Info
Title
The Hermeneutic Profit Of Annotation: On Preventing And Fostering Disagreement In Literary Analysis
Abstract
Interpretation is widely regarded as the core activity of literary studies. Still, the appropriate balance between the plurality and the limitation of possible interpretations is a non-trivial issue. Whereas it is sensible to accept that literary texts can generally have various meanings, it should not be possible to attribute any kind of meaning to a text. Therefore, while interpreters must be allowed to disagree in their analyses, it must at the same time be possible to review whether a disagreement is actually based on adequate reasons like, for example, textual ambiguity or polyvalence.In this paper, we propose a best practice model as one effective means to review disagreement in accordance with literary studies principles. The model has been developed during the collaborative, computer-assisted annotation of literary texts in a project in which short stories have been analyzed narratologically. The examination of inconsistently annotated text passages revealed four types of reasons for disagreement: misinterpretations, deficient definitions of the categories of analysis, dependencies of the relevant categories on preliminary analyses, and textual ambiguity/polyvalence. We argue that only disagreements based on textual ambiguity are considered legitimate or valuable cases of disagreement, whereas the other three types of disagreement can be resolved in a systematic way.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.3366/ijhac.2017.0194
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND ARTS COMPUTING-A JOURNAL OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES
Keywords
Field
DocType
annotation, collaborative annotation, hermeneutic annotation, polyvalence, ambiguity, disagreement, interpretation, text analysis, hermeneutics, narrative theory, narratology, time, order, duration, heuristics, best practice, CATMA
Social science,Annotation,Best practice,Heuristics,Interpreter,Literary criticism,Ambiguity,Hermeneutics,Linguistics,Geography,Narratology
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
11
2
1753-8548
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Evelyn Gius168.75
Janina Jacke203.04