Starting at the top: Notes on cliché and seduction in academic titles

November 4, 2010 By 4 Comments

As a writing fellow, I’ve had a few glimpses into the importance, faculty tell their students, of doing research. Part of this activity inevitably involves going to the library, or at least the library website, and scouring publications for pertinent scholarship to one’s inquiry. Since conducting “original research is a novelty for undergraduates, and since the electronic media offer myriad sources of information ready for the cutting-and-pasting, it make sense that a professor would be concerned with (1) making sure the student does not plagiarize others’ work and (2) instilling a sense that one’s research must enter an already ongoing conversation. So much of instructors’ pedagogical emphasis tends to lie in two fields: the moral and the intellectual, oftentimes in that order. I suspect that students do not make the connection between the two, too terrified of not (appearing to) tread on someone else’s intellectual toes to recognize that the point is to stand on their shoulders. Or, for those enterprising cheaters, the exercise may consist in, as Hillel Schwartz puts it (since I have no original way to put it), “mak[ing] their name by standing on shoulders buried in sand.” But my point here is to draw attention to a third register of the research experience: the aesthetic. Every stroll down the stacks aisles, every click through JSTOR articles, what faces the browsing scholar are titles, titles, and more titles. There soon appear patterns, styles, conventions, some kind of comforting regularity to the vastness of knowledge. Here I want to make some observations of the norms of titling in academic writing. These remarks are not (all) disparaging or snarky about the re-use, mis-use, or abuse of certain linguistic conventions in academia; I simply want to draw attention to how scholars label their work, reproducing in playful or unintentional ways specific kinds of headlines.

  • Present participles: This seems to be a symptom of the interest in and championing of processual approaches, that is, to present the world as in motion, in circulation, always becoming. The title of this post is parodying this cliché of the -ing verb. I am looking at my bookshelf right now and can spot them everywhere: Re-Presenting the City, Losing Control, Colonising Egypt, Exploring the City… I also see some clever variations on the theme: for example, where the title referencing another, more famous title (Coming of Age in Second Life), or where the present participle suggests multiple meanings (Enduring Innocence). Generally, however, the present participle has become a tired trend in titles. (I credit a former boss in publishing for bringing this to my attention and making it a minor obsession of mine.) Moving on…

  • The colon: You know you’re reading academic work when the title is cloven in two by the two dots. There’s not a precise anatomy, but generally the title proper is allusive in tone. The subtitle buttresses it with an explicatory phrase, as in: Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. The latter part is the only bit you really need to get a sense of the topic of the book. Usually the title itself is, ironically, a stylistic flourish, as if to communicate that the book also contains some panache and wit (not a guarantee).
  • Quote as title: I feel like this became vogue during the 1990s when high postmodernism celebrated the voice of the Other and pastiche between high and low culture. But you will still encounter titles, especially in anthropology, that headline a pithy phrase uttered by an ethnographic informant, or a Biblical or other textual bit. I suppose the function of this strategy is to convey some sense of the author’s egalitarianism vis-a-vis her subject.
  • The casual approach: This can go either way. “Notes on…” or “Reflections on…” or even “Some thoughts on…” can communicate the sense that the text will not be especially pedantic, written merely as some loose ideas that suggest more than they argue. Of course, if upon reading the piece disappoints and betrays the airy mood of the title, it can become a marker of pretentiousness.

In a winking gesture, I’ve tried to incorporate all these features in the title to this post. But I wonder what the undergraduate novice, wading through vast oceans of titles, makes of these kinds of conventions, if she makes anything at all of them. The title is not only the first thing you see about an article or book, but in the case of those you don’t actually sit down with–that is, the majority, the title can also be the last thing you read.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Asides, Copyright, Education, Fun, Higher Education, Language, Literacy, literature, Pedagogy, Plagiarism, Scholarship, Style, To Ponder, What if . . .

Reading the Remix

July 28, 2010 By 1 Comment

During the spring semester, we had some excellent Cac.ophony posts on the theme of remixing: “Agents of Information Change? Perhaps Not” by Melissa; “Vanilla Ice All Over Again” by Lauren; and “Lessig on Remix” by Wendy.  These posts raise essential questions about how we teach students to produce media in this digital age when it so easy to sample others’ work.

For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend  “Texts Without Contexts,” an essay from this past March by literary critic Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times books section.  Kakutani begins with a review of many of the challenges involved with production of media in our time, including reviews of texts new and old that challenge the boundaries of copyright law.

I found this part interesting, but was most struck by the next section, beginning with the following:

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

Kakutani focuses on intellectual, cultural, and social changes associated with the consumption of media.   She is not writing about teaching students how to read and research, but it is not difficult to see the implications for the classroom, as well as for graduate-level research, and the general communication challenges we grapple with on this blog.

Filed Under: Copyright, Internet, Media

We Own Everything, So You Don’t Have To

April 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Google logo render - Mark Knol
Creative Commons License photo credit: mark knol

As the startlingly rapid movement to digitize everything on earth marches on, questions ranging from the legal to the political to the philosophical continue to arise. One recent such instance came in the form of a lawsuit filed by the American Society of Media Photographers and other visual artist organizations, who are suing Google for its massive digital book-scanning project, arguing that Google is committing large-scale copyright infringement.  This article in the New York Times details the lawsuit and includes information on a possible settlement that will allow Google to continue scanning virtually every book in existence while providing artists with new ways to profit from their work.  Whatever the outcome of the case, though, it is clear that the current model of copyright law is being forced to evolve rapidly to keep pace with the tremendous legal issues that accompany a technological transformation as large in scale as the digital revolution.  Google’s seemingly inevitable goal, in the words of a University of Colorado professor quoted in the Times piece, “to control…virtually all information in the world,” may end up redefining the entire concept of intellectual “property.”  Essentially, no one will own anything, because Google will own everything.

Google’s dystopic implications are tempered by the insane practicality and amazing access it can provide to the world’s information.  As a historian of twentieth century America, I am in awe of Google’s book and magazine collection, which includes the entire run of LIFE magazine (advertisements and all) on top of hundreds of other titles.  Seriously, it’s amazing; go check it out.

An unavoidable part of living through this peculiar digital stage of human evolution is the growing sense that everything is online. This of course can’t be true, but it’s not going to stop Google from trying to keep an infinity of information within its control.  My own political orientation influences my deep pessimism about the direction of this inarguably necessary enterprise. How comfortable are you with Google’s stewardship of information?   The clip below, from HBO’s brilliantly prescient 1990s sketch comedy series Mr. Show with Bob and David, obscenely captures my perhaps irrational fear that Google is our Globochem…(warning:  adult language, which is kind of the point).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uco5Ed-5y2U[/youtube]

Filed Under: Copyright, Search Engines, Technology Tagged With: ,

Back to the Future

March 23, 2010 By 1 Comment

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart presented a 90 minute demo at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) in San Francisco.  He and his research team from the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute had been developing an online system (called NLS for oN Line System) since 1962, and at the FJCC they debuted the first computer mouse and demonstrated hypertext, file linking and tele-conferencing to an audience of one thousand.  Engelbart was concerned with collective intelligence and networked knowledge; only these paradigms of shared thinking, he proposed, could effectively meet the urgency and fast-changing nature of contemporary problems.

Engelbart is oft-associated with firsts and technological history; in the photograph below, his 1966 workstation is complete with keyboard, monitor, and square black mouse on the far right.

But at the same time, many conversations about the future of technology and networked life invoke Engelbart’s theoretical positions and proposed practices as guiding principles and visions not-yet-achieved.  He is as much a part of the discourses of origins as he is with those of the future. I thought of Engelbart recently while reading about poet and essayist Lewis Hyde’s new project on intellectual property and the cultural commons.  Hyde argues that we have not yet spoken back to the market-driven gluttony of copyright law by articulating precisely where and how a limit should be set between public and private.

So it was somehow no surprise to learn that the mouse-maker himself awarded the first Collective Intelligence Recognition Award for an organization to Creative Commons, the non-profit dedicated to promoting sharing within the limits of copyright law, at the 2008 Program for the Future conference.  It was a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the famous 1968 demo — and a simultaneous anointment of Engelbart as oracle of what’s to come.

Filed Under: Copyright, Symposium, Technology

Google’s Book Scanning Project

March 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

During my usual channel-surfing the other day, I caught an interesting debate on Google’s book scanning project. Robert Darnton (cultural historian at Harvard University), David C. Drummond (Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google) and author James Gleick were the participants in the discussion, each respectively representing the rights and interests of users/readers, Google, and authors/publishers.

In 2005, Google launched its ambitious project to digitize books. It has already scanned 12 million different titles so far. There were lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild against Google regarding a violation of copyright laws because a majority of these books (about 8 million) were out-of-print but still copyright protected. Under the new settlement reached in 2008, authors have control over how and when the material is displayed and receive a share of market revenue. The below video clip features Robert Darnton who criticizes this move as excluding the interests of readers, libraries, and the public good from the process.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18V0OAsLB9s[/youtube]

I am one of those old-fashioned people who prefer reading in print instead of on screen. But I can’t help but admit that electronic books might be our future destination, particularly considering the younger generations who were born digital. What bothers me the most is not whether or not we should trust the good will of Google, which is, after all, a profit-making private corporation. What is scarier is, as Darnton argues, we as users are not just ignored by one legal settlement and commercial deal between the Authors Guild and Google but excluded from any knowledge of what is happening behind the scene.

Filed Under: Copyright, literature, Tools

Vanilla Ice All Over Again

February 17, 2010 By 1 Comment

Yesterday I spoke with a faculty member about her frustration with plagiarism by students. One “innovative” technique that she noticed some students employing was the pastiche: whole paragraphs comprised of phrases and sentences culled from websites, press releases, newspapers, and textbooks, mashed together without any attribution or acknowledgment that the words were not entirely their own. While some students probably knew that they were plagiarizing but thought they could get away with it, others apparently have more benign intent: they haven’t yet internalized academic norms about appropriate use of sources and citation. Perhaps we can call these two types of plagiarism “bad faith plagiarism” and “good faith plagiarism.” Both types deserve penalty, but it is the former, I believe, that deserves more scorn. Students who plagiarize because they don’t know any better are students who are capable of learning proper citation techniques.

With this conversation fresh in my mind, I’ve been thinking about the recent case of plagiarism in Germany by a 17-year-old novelist. Apparently, author Helene Hegemann lifted passages, including an entire page, from someone else’s novel. Unlike the 2006 scandal involving teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan, who claimed that she had plagiarized in good faith, Hegemann readily admits to using another author’s words in her novel without any attribution–what I would call “bad faith plagiarism.” She claims, however, that her novel is akin to a musician who remixes or samples.

Some of Hegemann’s defenders claim a generational defense. The Guardian UK’s Robert McCrum argues that Hegemann’s novel is actually an example of “good faith plagiarism”:

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it’s clear from the reports I’ve read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she’s done is no more than “mixing” (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

Laura Miller isn’t having it:

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism — despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

The New York Times article hints that in addition to a generational defense, culture plays into it too. That is, remixing is just part of Berlin youth culture:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

My issue with the “Oh, she was just remixing” argument, however, is that Hegemann did not merely incorporate someone else’s words into her novel. By not acknowledging her sources, she was, in effect, passing off the entire novel as her own, and this, from my perspective, is what some of us stodgy old folks used to call “stealing.” Remixing and sampling can be great, innovative art forms. I’m a fan of Creative Commons. I think copyright rules are too strict. However, if you are going to riff on another person’s words, music, or ideas, you should at least give them credit for it.

If Vanilla Ice couldn’t get away with it, why should Hegemann?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE[/youtube]

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Copyright, Plagiarism

Lessig at Educause

November 11, 2009 By 2 Comments

Below is Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at last week’s Educause 2009: “It’s About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright.”  This 60 minute presentation is well worth the time of anyone who’s interested how antiquated copyright laws are impacting ecologies of freedom, access, education, and science in the digital age.  After delineating how we got to where we are, he advocates that rather than reforming existing laws, we instead challenge them by building alternative structures that will more flexibly, appropriately, and ethically govern information use.  Technologists and educators have specific and crucial roles in this: technologists must “build the code” for sanity by making it easier for others to effectively play by new rules, and educators must perform and encourage in our students skepticism towards rules that simply no longer make sense.

Also: as always, Lessig provides a captivating model for integrating text, images, and art into a presentation.

Filed Under: Copyright, Powerpoint and Presentations Tagged With: , , ,

New Media and the Idea of Freedom of Speech

October 12, 2009 By 1 Comment

Gabriella Coleman, cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Media Culture and Communication at NYU spoke at the Graduate Center about her research on the free and open source software movement and the hacker culture last Thursday. I couldn’t make it to her talk but was able to read her article “Code is Speech.” In this article, she investigates how Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers have contested and rewritten central concepts of modern liberalism, especially freedom of speech, by illustrating the cases of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and the protests provoked by their arrests between 1999 and 2003. Her article touches upon the sensitive issues such as intellectual property, copyright, and the notion of originality, which N. Katherine Hayles also problematizes as the products of the 18C liberal humanism in her book My Mother Was a Computer. Coleman writes:

“This is key to emphasize, for even if we can postulate a relation between a product of creative work—source code—and a democratic ideal—free speech, there is no necessary or fundamental connection between them (Ratto 2005). Many academics and programmers have argued convincingly that the act of programming should be thought of as literary—‘a culture innovative and revisionary close reading’ (Black 2002; see also Chopra and Dexter 2007). As with print culture of the last 200 years (Johns 2000), this literary culture of programming has often been dictated and delineated by a copyright regime whose logic is one of restriction. New free speech sensibilities, which fundamentally challenge the coupling between copyright and literary creation, must therefore be seen as a political act and choice, requiring sustained labor and creativity to stabilize these connections” (449).

Coleman’s words remind me of Mikhail’s recent post in which he weighed in on the question of openness of the VOCAT. I was excited to read that he believed the VOCAT should be free and open wide to other institutions and other developers, to benefit not only many other students and schools but also the tool itself so that it may evolve in ways we’ve never foreseen.

I also think that that’s how William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace,” envisions the Net in his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. With all the futurist horrors of mechanization of humanity imagined by the novel, it implies that the net can still be the brave new world for us as long as it remains open and public.

Filed Under: Copyright, Media, Tools

Lessig on Remix

March 19, 2009 By 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Lawrence Lessig, the intellectual property rights expert, speak at the main public library with Shepard Fairey, the artist who created the famous red-white-and-blue poster of Obama.  Lessig was promoting his new book, Remix, which again tackles the impact of increasingly stringent copyright laws on creativity.  The panel was moderated by Steven Johnson, who also has a new book, which looks at the history of ‘sampling’ by artists in all media, and they had some interesting examples, including work by Thomas Jefferson.  Lessig said he’s pulling away from the Free Culture movement in the next phase of his career, and will be focusing instead on Corruption (yes, capital C).  I think by that he means big business’s unseemly influence on our legislative process.

One surprise for me was how articulate Shepard Fairey was, considering that he’s a visual artist, not a lawyer/professor like Lessig, who’s used to harnessing the power of words.  Maybe Fairey has gotten some practice, defending himself against the legal battle he’s in with the Associated Press over his use of the photo he tweaked to create his ‘Hope’ poster.  After the talk, I created a similar image of myself at the site Obamicon.me.  Try it, it’s fun, although I found it hard to come up with a single word I embody, promote, or aspire to, like ‘hope.’

Here’s a short clip drawn from the much longer talk they gave:

Lessig at NYPL

Filed Under: Copyright, Internet, Media, Plagiarism, Technology