On Originality
Somehow reacting to a blog post feels more like handling a rattlesnake than responding to an article, book, or poem published by an institution. I don’t expect to attract attention in either case, but a blog lives and breathes. The Internet is a fluid medium in a way that print has never been. That seems to be Sample’s point when he said digital humanities is about sharing. That said, I’m especially intrigued by his second redefinition: Deformed Humanities. So here goes.
Digital humanities “is destroying things,” Sample says. It’s “born of broken, twisted things.” I like that angle, though (and because) in fact it seems akin to analysis, which is by definition breaking things down, unloosing, dissecting. Haven’t the humanities always done this? I don’t think Sample’s methods are so different, nor do I fully accept his assertion that deformation does not “go back to the original text” and has “little regard for preserving the original whole.” The new product has no meaning without its association with the original. Hacking the Accident acknowledges its relationship to Hacking the Academy in its title. He may not put Humpty back together, but it’s Humpty nonetheless. If it weren’t, it would just be another smashed egg.
These deformations reinvent the originals, imply connections to their originals, challenge us to reconcile with the originals, provoke new thinking about the originals. But the common denominator is still the original texts. Just like fan fiction and mashups, to cite more examples from Sample’s post, they are founded on the originals even as they undermine and explode the originals.
Visualizations of texts can have intrinsic value as art (and I stray, perhaps, from Sample’s intent here): this representation of six sacred texts from world religions is beautiful. But it exists because the texts were here first, and its beauty may be empty without returning to those texts for meaning.
Image: Ken Flerlage. “Word Usage in Sacred Texts.” KenFlerlage.com.
Sources:
Mark Sample. “Notes towards a Deformed Humanities.” samplereality, 2 May 2012.
2 Replies to “On Originality”
How would you feel if someone used the visual representation you pictured as basis for a piece of visual art, without any reference to the text? If you saw a painting based on that, I think you could find beauty in spite of not knowing it was a word count graphic. I feel like that is some of the value of these deconstructive humanities.
I hadn’t really conceptualized the fact that without these texts and artifacts existing, the pieces that we draw from them would have no meaning. I think that is important to understand as we are taking things apart and examining them.