Einsam oder gemeinsam?

This paper examines the significance of the distinction between understanding and explanation for digital linguistics. It argues that understanding and explanation should not be regarded as isolated practices, but are closely linked and complement each other. To this end, it starts with the well-known conceptual dichotomy from Romantic hermeneutics and incorporates more recent contributions to a unified scientific concept of explanation as well as to a pragmatic theory of understanding. Understanding is treated in digital linguistics as an unreflective incidental practice, while explanations are well-methodologised in their various types. The notion of contextualisation, established in various linguistics fields, seems suitable to methodologically grasp corpus linguistic understanding. Even if the importance of statistical explanations grows with increasing stocks of quantifiable data, understanding in context must not remain unreflective and requires a methodological basis. On the level of practical access, the article highlights annotation as a method that integrates understanding and explanation. In particular, collaborative understanding plays a key role in annotation processes. The article ends with two examples of application.