Research tools for computational close reading.

🌐 Website and map: computational-hermeneutics.github.io

Computational Hermeneutics is a family of tools that bring the apparatus of textual criticism and interpretation to computational artefacts, to code as much as to text. Software is written, copied, edited, forked, and revised; it carries variants, witnesses, and emendations exactly as a literary text does, and like a literary text it can be read closely or read comparatively. The tools here treat computational artefacts as objects of reading rather than only of execution or measurement, and they keep interpretation and attestation bound together: no reading is offered without the evidence that supports it. The tools are local-first, interpretively serious, and built for close reading rather than distant measurement.

The tools are grouped by method. The close-reading method opens a single artefact for intensive interpretation; comparative analysis sets witnesses side by side and reads the differences between them.

• CCS Workbench, the close reading of a single artefact of code. Annotation, critique, and interpretation in the critical code studies tradition, across three modes: critique, interpret, create. Live at ccs-wb.vercel.app.

• Source Variorum, the collation of two or more witnesses of a text, code or prose. A braided workbench rendering additions, deletions, substitutions, and transpositions with an auto-generated critical apparatus. Live at sourcevariorum.vercel.app.

graph TB
  subgraph reading["Close reading (single artefact)"]
    C["CCS-WB\ncode as cultural text"]
  end

  subgraph collation["Comparative analysis (multiple witnesses)"]
    S["Source Variorum\nwitnesses side by side"]
  end

  C -.shared annotation layer.-> S
  S -.loci for close reading.-> C

  classDef reading fill:#ffffff,stroke:#9c7c34,color:#181818,stroke-width:1.2px;
  classDef collation fill:#ffffff,stroke:#2f4a6b,color:#181818,stroke-width:1.2px;
  class C reading;
  class S collation;

The tools operationalise commitments developed across critical code studies, textual scholarship, and the critical theory of computation. The scholarship sets the conceptual ground; the tools are the working apparatus.

Critical code studies: Marino, M.C. (2020) Critical Code Studies (MIT Press); Montfort, N. et al. (2014) 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)) (MIT Press); Berry, D.M. (2011) The Philosophy of Software (Palgrave).

Textual scholarship and hermeneutics: McGann, J.J. (1991) The Textual Condition (Princeton UP); McKenzie, D.F. (1999) Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge UP); Gadamer, H.-G. (2004) Truth and Method.

Critical theory of computation: Berry, D.M. (2014) Critical Theory and the Digital (Bloomsbury); Berry, D.M. and Fagerjord, A. (2017) Digital Humanities (Polity); Ciston, S., Berry, D.M. et al. (2026) Inventing ELIZA (MIT Press).

For per-tool deep dives and the full reading guide see computational-hermeneutics.github.io.

Computational Hermeneutics is directed by David M. Berry. The tools are offered as-is under permissive licences. See each repository for details.