Friday Frontiers November 2025

Fri 7th Nov, 10.30 WET / 11.30 CET / 12.30 EET

Title: Retrieving Context, Re-centring Interpretation: AI Hermeneutics and the Democratisation of Reading

Speaker: Prof. Jenny C.Y. Kwok, Hong Kong Baptist University

Registration: https://dariah.zoom.us/meeting/register/BvhAgdWHTh2eA0xODMpVnQ 

Abstract

In digital humanities, retrieval technologies have always mediated how we read, from concordances to search engines. With the advent of large language model and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) which was made available by the former, interpretation itself becomes procedural: machines now arguably perform a version of the critic’s movement between evidence and hypothesis, inviting debates and questions on the way (literary) reading might have been changed or even challenged. This talk introduces AI hermeneutics, an approach that treats RAG not as automation but as interpretive infrastructure, opening up an opportunity to integrate AI into the existing reading experience.