gms | German Medical Science

Background and Purpose: Hermeneutic analysis is a central approach in the epistemologies of Social Sciences, Humanities and withit Nursing. The methodical steps of a Philosophical Hermeneutics informed interpretation process enable the deployment of a trustworthy understanding of the phenomenon explored. In collaboration across disciplines from Humanities, Social Sciences, Nursing to Computer Linguistic, the aim of this project is to identify and specify potential improvements of hermeneutic analysis by automated annotations. Annotation, often named differently such as coding depending on the research context, is a central work technique in all hermeneutic processes for signifying meaning and by this making them accessible to scholarly analyses.

Model/Framework: Philosophical Hermeneutics builds the framework of this research project (Gadamer 1990; Gaidys 2005; Fleming et al. 2003). Particularly the hermeneutic circle is used to identify assumptions and structures of understandings.

Methods: An automated analytic procedures specific to hermeneutic with examples drawn from dialogues with critically ill patients will be described. The research project examines specific possibilities of interpretations and its ambiguities. The decisions which lead for example to the interpretation of emotions, the role of gender, the meaning of special word frequencies and the analyzing of characters and figures will be displayed transparently to explain an semi-automatic analyzing process.

Methodological and Theoretical Focus: Academic disciplines use texts as research data; texts are also the starting point of this research project. However, there is a broad spectrum of understandings of what a text is, with a broad range including also non-standard languages in transcripts of spoken language. This variety of texts provides challenges for annotation and its automatization. Scholars analyse text passages in hermeneutic processes, which are circular or iterative and aim for an increasingly deeper understanding of its meanings. Ambiguity and vagueness in the text are particular challenges for this. At the same time it is a strength of hermeneutic analyses to work with them as long as they are done by people but not automatized. In contrast standardizations, as identifications of a canonical meaning, play a key role in automatized approaches. Most automatizations begin with unambiguous, rule-governed annotations. This affinity of manual annotations to ambiguity of meaning on the one hand and of the automatized annotations to deterministic interpretations of meaning on the other hand indicate a coherence that is relevant and applicable also for research processes.

Results: The authors report preliminary findings of an semi-automatic approach to hermeneutic analysis of qualitative data. A comprehensive automatization of manual hermeneutic processes can not be realized; on the background of the current state of the art this would be an unrealistic intention.

Conclusions: The interdisciplinary approach facilitates a transfer of methodological knowledge into diverse disciplines and furthermore supports a broad understanding of the requirements from the Humanities to the Computer Sciences. This study presents possibilities and values of an semi-automated analysis for Philosophical Hermeneutic text interpretation in nursing research.