About

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.

Hermeneutic AI helps the qualitative social sciences and humanities regain agency and harness the power of AI according to their foundational principles and values, with a healthy of dose of realism about actual machine capabilities, and an open-minded attitude to its potential for the renewal and amplification of human thinking.

The lab works in two main directions:

• Studying AI interpretively. Treating large language models and their interactions with humans as focus of hermeneutic and social-scientific inquiry — asking what kind of thinkers and readers LLMs are, what biases they carry, and how they participate in the production and circulation of human meaning and value.
• Building AI for interpretive scholarship and analysis. Designing instruments (see our Tools) that extend the reach of close reading of texts and amplify — rather than replace — human judgment.

Our Research Notes are written in an experimental and exploratory spirit, trying to keep up pace with fast and little understood advances in the field. We welcome conversation with scholars, students, analysts, and software developers who share these questions — get in touch at contact@hrmn.ai

Lab members

Victor Shammas

Sociologist · Associate Professor, University of Bergen

Victor Shammas is a sociologist. He is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Bergen and holds a PhD from the University of Oslo (2017). His work moves across political economy, critical theory, comparative penology, and digital sociology, with articles in Punishment & Society, British Journal of Criminology, Constellations, and Capital & Class. He also writes the newsletter Theory Brief. → Research: victorshammas.com

Vito Laterza

Anthropologist · Associate Professor, University of Agder

Vito Laterza is an anthropologist and media scholar. He is Associate Professor of Global Development and Planning at the University of Agder, Norway. A Cambridge PhD, his current work focuses on digital media, political communication, digital platforms, interpretive AI, and the dialectic between analogue and digital humanity. He co-edits the thematic collection “Critical Simulation Studies” for the journal Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. → Full Academic Profile / Linkedin