As disruptive as Mark Sample’s suggestion that Deformance should be regarded as a legitimate digital humanities undertaking, I simply couldn’t accept his proposition as adoptable. There are two broad reasons why. First, leaving the text means leaving academic inquiry. Second, deformance is merely performance, or maybe a better term might be reformance.
To begin, humanistic studies are centered around the text (any art form) as a representative model for something. No, not every field in humanism studies a text. Languages and history come to mind. However, Sample focuses his discussion on textual studies, and suggests the deformance “has become a key methodology of the branch of digital humanities that focuses on text analysis and data-mining.”
Essentially, deformance is rooted in a text and leaving the text. It doesn’t sit well for me to suggest leaving the text in order to discover something. Discover something about what? The wreckage? In my mind, that’s still a text. My argument could now go on to point two or point three, either discussing the what deformance actually discovers, or the place of “wreckage” that already exists in the Humanities.
If not wreckage, then what? Sample’s answer is a new text. Well, then we haven’t really escaped the text – just repurposed it. Performance, as unsatisfactory as it is, is the wrong term. Reformance would be better in my mind that performance or deformance. Reformance suggests a homage to the original text. It also acknowledges the performance aspect of changing and adapting an old text into a new one.
Sample acknowledges that this isn’t a new idea. While he mentions mashups, fan fiction, and remixes, we might also consider any form of adaption as a reformance, deformance, or performance. His example of Hacking the Accident seems no different to me than a parody – repurposing an old work, story, or text to tell a new tale. I give him the leniency that this might not be the best example of deformance. However, it’s simply reformance or performance.
What else could be de/reformance? What about meme’s? Repurposing an existing photo to engage some social commentary or humor? Another example is predictive text systems. A Twitter moment was recently trending where people would type “I was born…” and then click on the predictive text to finish the phrase. The results are funny, and equally bizarre as Hacking the Accident.
Type “I was born” and then let your predictive write your autobiography.
— Bradley Geiser * (@therealbradg) November 3, 2017
Those are just two examples of deformance in action. Although Sample doesn’t say this, I think he is in favor of using software to produce new outcomes. Unfortunately for his thesis, deformance might not be as clear cut as he thinks, nor can we leave the text to explore it’s potential.
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