Hermeneutic AI
A research lab for interpretive artificial intelligence.
Hermeneutic AI is a social science research lab studying interpretive artificial intelligence — how large language models and related systems can serve as instruments of interpretation, and what they mean for the craft of understanding.
We build tools and write research notes for sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars across the interpretive social sciences and humanities and for those who are interested in these disciplines: researchers and analysts whose work turns on meaning, context, and close reading rather than prediction alone.
Tools
- News Monitor
Live
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
Live
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
Live
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
In Development
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
In Development
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.
Recent Research Notes
- AI and Authenticity
August 19, 2026
Much anti-AI positioning in academia rests on its weakest argument: authenticity. Drawing on Adorno, Bourdieu, Haraway, Stiegler, and social theorists, this note argues there is no pre-technological, "natural" self to protect — and asks what bolder forms of thinking and writing with AI higher education might pursue instead.
- What Is Hermeneutic AI?
July 3, 2026
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.”