The heart of the digital humanities is not the production of knowledge. It’s
the reproduction of knowledge.
The promise of the digital is not in the way it allows us to ask new
questions because of digital tools or because of new methodologies made possible
by those tools. The promise is in the way the digital reshapes the
representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge.
a short essay by Peter Stallybrass that appeared in the PMLA in 2007. Stallybrass’s article has the
provocative title “Against Thinking,” and in it, he argues that we think too
much and don’t work enough.
Thinking is boring, repetitious, and “indolent” (1583). On the other hand,
working is “easy, exciting,” and “a process of discovery” (1583). Working is
challenging.
a key insight that students and scholars alike need to be reminded of: tortured
and laborious thinking does not automatically translate into anything of
importance
collaborative construction, I mean a collective effort to build
something new, in which each student’s contribution works in dialogue with every
other student’s contribution
They are making it for each other, and, in the best scenarios, for the outside
world
Creative analysis is the practice of discovering knowledge through the act of
creation—through the making of something new
I ask the students to do something they find severely discomfiting: creating
something new for which no models exist.
If I were to say what unites these various forms of building in my classroom, I
might use the term “deformance
A combination of “performance” and “deform,” deformance is an interpretative
concept premised upon deliberately misreading a text
As my students build—both collaboratively and creatively—they are also
reshaping, and that very reshaping is an interpretative process. It is not
writing, or at least not only writing. And it is certainly not only thinking. It
is work, it has an audience, and it is something my students never expected.