Growing up I loved to draw. I spent hours drawing things in front of me just as I perceived them. When I got to high school and my art teacher put Picasso’s drawing of Igor Stravinsky in front of the class upside down and told us to draw it, everything in me resisted. In my eyes, the point of drawing was to record the world around me, to display things as they were, but my teacher wanted me to draw something that was upside down! It seemed silly and useless, but she explained that by drawing something that was upside down, I would not be looking at the overall form of the image and copying it. I would be putting together individual lines and shapes that wouldn’t seem to make sense, and they didn’t – until I finished drawing and rotated the paper upright. It looked just like the drawing that I referenced. Because I focused not on drawing a man (which I already had preconceived notions about how to draw) but on drawing lines and shapes in exact relation to each other, the finished product matched the reference.

My teacher forced me to look at the image in pieces, to put it together piece by piece in a way that was unfamiliar to me. This idea differs somewhat from what Mark Sample proposes in which “the Deformed Humanities tears apart existing structures and uses the scraps” (Sample 2012). While I did look at the scraps or pieces of an image because I was unable to see it as a whole, my goal was to put it together just as it was meant to appear. Sample, on the other hand, seeks to look at humanities from more of a cubist perspective in which the artist seeks to show multiple perspectives of a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional plane.

In cubism, the artist does not seek to compose an image as it looks to the natural eye, rather, he seeks to take an object apart and look at the pieces side by side in ways that have never been seen before. Cubist artists provide new perspectives of an object or event by putting multiple perspectives together to be seen at once. Such is the case in Rush Hour, New York by Max Weber. Weber depicts elements of the city and bustle all together without composing an image of the actual scene. He evokes the chaos and excitement of the event by taking pieces apart and letting them be, rather than composing them in a way we would expect. By taking something apart and allowing the pieces just to be, without seeking to put them together “correctly,” we see patterns and beauty that went previously unnoticed. By practicing digital humanities we can, as Sample argues, experience “a departure, leading us somewhere new entirely” (Sample 2012).