In some varieties of the digital humanities, the idea of 'deformance' has gained some traction as a way of making meaning. The way things break is interesting. Consider learning how to code: type something wrong, and the screen fills with error messages. Parse those errors correctly, and you learn much. Conversely, do things correct the first time, and you are rewarded with another blinking cursor. Nothing much appears to happen. Breaking things is where learning happens. But there is also a third, more liminal space between something that is broken, and something that works. You could call it GlitchSpace, or that zone where things break in weird yet still quasi-functioning ways.
In this piece I consider ways in which the exploration of GlitchSpace can transform not just our teaching but also our relationship with the digital. Glitching - to seek out or make glitches deliberately - reintroduces 'resistance in the material' and thus returns the humanity to DH.