Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department conference room.

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

  • A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
  • The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
  • Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
  • The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
  • Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
  • A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Baruch College, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Internet, Literacy, Media, Plagiarism, Politics, Scholarship, Search Engines, teaching, Technology, To Ponder, What if . . .

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: ,

Google Burn-out as Occupational Hazard

July 22, 2008 By 1 Comment

While imbibing Lorna Hutson’s introduction to Ben Jonson’s collected plays, I was intrigued by this passage about the thematic and stylistic differences between Shakespeare and Jonson:

“In fact, Jonson has a complex sense of human psychology, but his interest as a dramatist lies more in the psychology of habitual behavior than behavior in the transitional moments of life crisis for which Shakespeare’s plays are often metaphors. He is also interested in the way that human desires, anxieties and creative energies are affected by the material conditions of their communication.”

Jonson’s interest in these material conditions birthed some good stuff, like Epicoene, a play in which the character “Morose” develops a nervous reaction to the noise and congestion of London; he double-lines his walls, insulates his windows, seeks a silent wife, and even plans a silent wedding. While reading Morose’s comic antics, I was reminded of a recent posting on the blog Burnt Out Adjunct, who writes about the ‘Research = Google’ phenomenon that’s pitting frustrated professors against usually-clueless students in universities across the country. (World?) Maybe it’s all in a name, but suddenly, the familiar plight of poor Burnt Out seemed to strangely echo the desperate shutting-out attempts of Morose.

“Contemporary students come to college with a different set of expectations than they did even ten years ago,” Burnt Out notes. “These students are not agog at the level and breadth of information available to them. Rather, they expect to be able to, within a few key strokes, to gain access to whatever information they seek.” Cut to cranky professors trying to hold their research high ground, sputtering “but…but…” while the well-meaning libraries scramble to catalog information in new and easier and more searchable ways that do everything but deliver e-journals to students with a side of fries and a coke.

Perhaps for many of us though—especially those of us still in the slow drip of a doctoral program—both sides of the battlefield make sense. Sure, we grew up with Atari and eventually graduated to SuperNintendo, but many of us went to school before there was a computer in every classroom, and attended undergrad right around the time that card catalogs were transforming into still-lifes in the hallowed halls of our libraries. We know what Burnt Out knows—that “the Net does not cast the skein that one might assume.” And so while I’ve plenty of times found myself “just checking” the exact date of which Dumas was which on Wikipedia, I’m still made uncomfortable by a student relying on it as one of their sources for a speech or paper. (And it’s very easy to somehow dump on Wikipedia first; wisegeek.com and answers.com seem to be just as popular these days, and there are of course plenty others.) If only it were as simple as the use of pure plagiarism sites like dreamessays.com, but those kinds of offenses are the most easily detected and argued against.

Earning his moniker, Burnt Out ends his posting on a negative note: “So, committees will form, grants will be given and studies will recommend that individual professors seek to imbue a research skill-set into their objectives. And without a standard (either a collective standard (MLA) or an organizational approach (ie Google)), the Natives and the Profs will continue to lament just how odd, lazy, out-of-touch, etc. the other is.” I’m not ready to feel quite so despairing—perhaps because I think that imbuing a research skill-set can go a long way, depending on its implementation— but also because I’m somewhat wary that a collective standard issued by MLA will really connect to the heart of the problem (especially given the reality of the student population found at so many large universities, which seems to prohibit a one-size-fits-all approach from the get-go). And also because I wonder what the point of frowning in the face of the coming tide will really accomplish.

It raises an interesting question, to be sure: what part of the problem is just plain ol’ insistence on things being as we were taught? And how can we embrace the challenge of defending why an article on Walt Disney from the Journal of Popular Culture is preferred (and required) over one from Wikipedia? How do we rise to the task of communicating these reasons to our students in innovative and effective ways, rather than just putting a big “X” through wisegeek.com in their Bibliography? After all, as much as Morose tries escaping the noise, he’s the one who ends up looking like an absurd old man and unsympathetic spoiler—easily polarizing characterizations that risk getting in the way of communication most of all.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, literature, Pedagogy, Search Engines

Googlewhacked!

July 17, 2007 By 2 Comments

We here at cac.ophony recently received this curious email from across the pond:

Dear Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute

I am writing to you from Kent, England. It’s the county just below London.
I wanted to inform you that your blog (http://cac.ophony.org/) is infact a Googlewhack!

In case you do not know about Googlewhacks, basically it is a game people play with the search engine google. In an attempt to find just one solitary result, they enter two completely random and unrelated words that appear on dictionary.com. My two words were “Jot Semipublicly.”

Following a link to your larger website I stumbled upon this contact.

I thought it appropriate to tell you that you were infact a googlewhack, because if I didn’t, I’d be googlewhacking behind your back.

Hope to hear from you!

Adam

Wow. How cool. A googlewhack here at cac.ophony! What an interesting distinction. There is but one place on the entire world wide web where the words “jot” and “semipublicly” appear on the same page and it is here! Who would have thought? Thanks for letting us know, Adam of Kent!

The official Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute Googlwhack Award goes to our own Kate Moss who authored this googlewhackalicious post.

UPDATE: Here’s Adam’s response to my email letting him know about this post:

Wow.

That was simply my primary response when I saw this page that had been published. I do not recall the last time I was so stereotypically english when reading that there was an official Googlewhack award, exclaiming loudly “Bloody ‘ell!”

This has absolutley made my day, even my month after all these nearby floods and terrible weather. Thank you very much for taking such time and effort.

Thanks Again

Adam

Filed Under: Asides, Fun, Search Engines