A friend of mine pointed out The Guardian's 8 August 2014 blog piece "Rogeting: Why 'Sinister Buttocks' Are Creeping into Students' Essays." (The "traditional" grammarian in me wants to point out that is should be "Is Creeping," since the phrase "Sinister Buttocks" is labeled as a phrase and thus as a singular item. The quotation marks serve to make it one thing. But that is something of an aside.) The piece is a mocking take on the plagiaristic practice of copying a text over and then changing words to some of their synonyms in the hopes of thwarting plagiarism-detection software or the eyes of vigilant instructors. The piece highlights the ludicrousness of the practice through offering examples of it at its most humorous, noting both that the practice leads to inarticulate nonsense on the page and that it leads to something that sounds much like expected business-speak. As a piece of satire, it works well--for those already inclined to think plagiarism a bad thing.
Not all do, of course. Obviously, some think it an acceptable practice, or they would not do it, and the article would have had no cause to be. Also, ideas of what does and does not count as plagiarism are in flux, as I have discussed repeatedly. (I tend to reject the idea of full freedom of use; I work at much of what I release into the world, and I would like to benefit from that work less ephemerally than the work alone allows. It will help me get to eat and to feed my daughter.) And I am sure that the question comes up for some who look at Rogeting of how those who do it cannot see the folly of the practice. Do they not know that what they do is wrong? Do they not know that the words on the page are incoherent drivel, rendered so by the multiple denotations of the words for which synonyms are found and the connotations of the synonyms deployed? The results are laughable--or would be did they not transgress as they do.
The answer to such questions, of course, is "no." Leaving aside the issue of "wrongness" for reasons noted above, the issue of incoherence merits attention. In my experience, students do not often review their work. (The assignment sequences in my composition classes call for multiple drafts, some of which I examine. Many students change nothing from draft to draft. They then wonder why their grades suffer.) This means that they do not read back over what they have written to see or hear if it works well, if it is both euphonious and sensible. More, many students operate with an...inaccurate idea of what is euphonious in the context for which they write. (As I may have noted before, although I cannot be sure,) I have known students to think that academic writing has to be a certain way, to use the biggest possible words to be able to sound as intelligent as it needs to be. This leads to what I call the Oswald Bates phenomenon, something akin to malapropism and not unlike the results of Rogeting. Those who engage in the practice likely think the text is improved by it, made to sound smarter through the use of "higher" diction. And I do not think it is an issue limited to students...
Showing posts sorted by date for query plagiarism. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query plagiarism. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Monday, December 16, 2013
20131216.1625
That I am so relatively tardy in posting today is an artifact of the down-time that the intersession break allows. I do not at present have the pressure of having to head off to work or to one of the other things that I have to do during a regular semester at the moment, which has its benefits. It also has drawbacks in its promotion of laziness, and I have noted that I already suffer from that particularly human plight enough. I do not need things to add to it; I rather need the opposite, but it seems that I am not likely to find it in the next few days.
My tardiness and laziness, however, do not mean that I do not have things to do or things to say. For instance, I can comment about Rebecca Schuman's 13 December 2013 Salon.com article "The End of the College Essay." In the article, Schuman argues " that the required-course college essay is a failure," citing rampant plagiarism, the overall disdain students have for the comments that instructors leave on student papers, and the dissatisfaction many college instructors voice regarding their students' work as reasons to abandon the practice. Since, Schuman argues, college is more about getting a job (something I have discussed before), and the jobs students are likely to do will not really require them to put together a coherent argument, and since students generally do not engage with the work of essay-writing in any event, there is no point to requiring students to write essays. The exercise is wasteful and unpleasant, and therefore to be avoided.
I know from having looked at their comments that some of my colleagues have already voiced their disagreement with Schuman (although I have not read their comments in detail). At the risk of sounding once again like I am saying "Me, too," in a desperate attempt to fit in, I offer my own disagreements with Schuman:
My tardiness and laziness, however, do not mean that I do not have things to do or things to say. For instance, I can comment about Rebecca Schuman's 13 December 2013 Salon.com article "The End of the College Essay." In the article, Schuman argues " that the required-course college essay is a failure," citing rampant plagiarism, the overall disdain students have for the comments that instructors leave on student papers, and the dissatisfaction many college instructors voice regarding their students' work as reasons to abandon the practice. Since, Schuman argues, college is more about getting a job (something I have discussed before), and the jobs students are likely to do will not really require them to put together a coherent argument, and since students generally do not engage with the work of essay-writing in any event, there is no point to requiring students to write essays. The exercise is wasteful and unpleasant, and therefore to be avoided.
I know from having looked at their comments that some of my colleagues have already voiced their disagreement with Schuman (although I have not read their comments in detail). At the risk of sounding once again like I am saying "Me, too," in a desperate attempt to fit in, I offer my own disagreements with Schuman:
- Schuman notes the increasingly vocational aspect of undergraduate education. It is part of work that it is not always pleasant, that tasks are required of employees that they would rather not do. In some of my older jobs, I was obliged to clean restrooms--and I hated doing so, particularly given whom I knew used them. Yet it was either do so or cease earning a paycheck--and the paycheck was worth more. Students need to learn such lessons, and I have had many who never had jobs before they came into my classes; better with me than with their solvency at stake.
- There are work issues that will bear in on writing. Despite hopes, sometimes there are legal problems, and those problems depend largely on written documentation for their resolution. The skills developed in essay writing therefore do have a direct bearing on work--even for the non-writer.
- As many have noted, there are other skills developed in essay writing than in essay writing---if students are obliged to develop them. I discuss the matter with my own students as being, if nothing else, practice in attending to small details--and that skill applies in every discipline.
- Students are typically quite young. What they think they want may well not be what they actually want. That they do not want to write essays does not mean that they will not want to do so.
- There is more to the student than the intended job. The essay offers an avenue into that "more." It is not the only avenue, certainly, but it is one.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
20120126.1832
As part of the teaching I am engaged in, I try to provide a number of examples to my students of how I want things done. This semester, I am teaching three classes which have as explicit requirements the composition of summaries; I have them read and summarize articles from the New York Times Opinion/Editorial section, and because I want them to succeed, I show them what kinds of things I want done. To that end, I recently put together the following summary, posting it to the teaching blog I maintain so that my students can more easily access it:
The great opening of information that digital work performs does set up a climate in which anyone can access and contribute to information, and the concepts of ownership of ideas and the receipt of credit for articulating them are becoming more contested. That Fish makes claims that grate is not a reason to reject him out of hand; he does make a number of good points, and even when he does not, the fact that he does pose questions, that he compels them and the defense of ideas that they entail, is a good thing. One of the tenets of critical thinking, that chimera we are exhorted to pursue in our classrooms, is that one must question ideas and claims, and in the questioning, they are either strengthened or shown to merit being discarded--an idea DePalma lays out quite succinctly in his article.
That he says what he says is not the problem. What he says can be argued against--and any scholar should expect that there will be argument against it. Certainly, Fish's position against the value of the digital humanities is argued against. Purdy and Walker, for example, assert the need to integrate digital scholarship into the rubrics used for hiring, promotion, and tenure, noting that it is "often more likely than print to be read and used" (190). Their position is hardly in line with that of Fish. In addition, Profession 2011 gives as much of itself to discussion of digital scholarship as Profession 2009 devotes to Fish, and it would not likely do so were there not something to discuss about the matter. In it, Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen make the point early on that "humanities disciplines must find ways not simply of evaluating but also of valuing digital scholarship" (123). The position is one more or less diametrically opposed to that Fish outlines in his New York Times piece, and it is one supported by a number of other scholars. Excellent speller Geoffrey Rockwell, for instance, remarks on the potential for the development of new modes of inquiry by digital scholarship, viewing it as one of the assets of digital work (154-55). Jerome McGann, whose “On Creating a Usable Future” I have discussed, even asserts digital scholarship as a potential corrective to the crisis in which the academic humanities currently find themselves. It is hardly a condemnation of the field of study.
No, the problem is not that he says what he says. The problem is where he says what he says.*
Many people read the New York Times, whether in printed or online format, and so Fish is positioned to be able to address a wide audience through writing for it. The position is one that not many in academia have; most of us speak to our students and our colleagues about our work and the views we come to have through it, and we try to publish articles and books, but in reality few people outside the academic establishment (and not as many within it as should be the case) pay attention to what goes on within the walls of the proverbial ivory tower. The affairs of those descended from Chaucer's Clerk do not often penetrate the perceptions of the bulk of people in the United States, something I think I have commented on before (here, here, here, and here, if not elsewhere). So what Fish writes has the opportunity to exert disproportionate influence on popular perception of the work done by those in the humanities. When he decides to condemn a field of study, then, he does more than simply express a divergent opinion of scholarly discipline--which he is certainly within his rights to do, both as a human being and as a scholar. He marshals opposition to the ability of others to do their work--and in that, he undermines himself, for in saying that any one of us working in the academic humanities is wasting time to no good purpose, the accusation that any others of us, or even all of us, are similarly wasteful becomes not just possible but viable.
After all, if even our own are calling into question whether or not the work we do is actually worth doing as a field, as opposed to simply disagreeing about results or specific methods...
Works Cited**
~Bizzell, Patricia. "Composition Studies Saves the World!" Profession 2009 (2009): 94-98. Print.
~Culler, Johnathan. "Writing to Provoke." Profession 2009 (2009): 84-88. Print.
~DePalma, Michael-John. "Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching: A Pragmatic Response to the Challenge of Belief." CCC 63.2 (December 2011): 219-43. Print.
~Fish, Stanley. "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation." NYTimes.com. New York Times, 23 January 2010. Web. 24 January 2012.
~McGann, Jerome. “On Creating a Usable Future.” Profession 2011 (2011): 182-95. Print.
~Purdy, James P., and Joyce R. Walker. "Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work." Profession 2010 (2010): 177-95. Print.
~Rockwell, Geoffrey. "On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship." Profession 2011 (2011): 152-68. Print.
~Schreibman, Susan, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen. Introduction. Profession 2011 (2011): 123-35. Print.
*I understand that this comment is somewhat problematic. I think I explain the reasoning behind it in the following paragraph, but I do know that I appear to tread dangerously close to advocating censorship. For the record, here as often, I am not generally in favor of restricting speech, particularly academic speech (do I need to make a full disclosure statement here?). Fish has every right to voice his opinion, and he goes to great length to support that opinion, so that he is exercising sufficiently due diligence--even if he is wrong. And the Times has the right to print what it pleases, both as an instrument of "the press" and as a business providing a product. That does not mean that I have to be happy, or that I in fact am happy, to have seen it pop up where it did. There is a lot of potential for damage in it, and since I am one of those who may be damaged by it, I think I have the right to express my displeasure at the decision no less than did Fish and the Times to make it.
**I am aware of the irony of my employing a preponderance of print sources in discussing digital scholarship. Many of my sources, however, discuss the necessity of interplay between traditional print and new digital media. I hope to be aligned with the practice current research suggests is preferable.
On 23 January 2012, Stanley Fish's "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation" appeared in the online New York Times. In the article, Fish complains that the tools being developed and employed by digital humanities scholars are changing methods of study for the worse by eliminating the possibility and need for critical interpretation. He opens by carrying out a mock-reading of Milton's Areopagitica, using it as an exemplar of the kind of work that digital humanities facilitates, pointing out the inadequacy of such work by asserting that the simple existence of a pattern does not suffice to support a given interpretation of that pattern. Fish moves on to assert that the simple identification of patterns is the focus of digital humanities research, a paradigm diametrically opposed to the methods by which literary criticism has been carried out for nearly a century. He assails digital humanities work because it does not, in his view, offer closure and meaning, but rather rejects the certainty of meaning that he presents as the end-point of his own critical analysis. Unfortunately, the article fails to convince for several reasons: he indulges in reductio ad absurdum arguments based on supposition errors (such as a tacit assertion that digital humanities research never approaches a text with an idea of critical approach already in hand, that researchers wholly hand over their agency to the machines), over-simplification, and, in his last paragraph, an excessive degree of smirking sarcasm.Fish exerts a certain influence on those working in the academic humanities. For instance, more than a third of Profession 2009 is devoted to responses to and from Stanley Fish; for an annual publication to focus so narrowly on a single scholar bespeaks the importance of that scholar. Even those people who take issue with him concede that he does have useful things to say. Patricia Bizzell provides one example ready to hand for me. Jonathan Culler provides another. So it is clear that he is worth attention. And even in critiquing digital scholarship, he is not entirely in error; there are, admittedly, problems with the field. Some of the questions he raises are questions that need to be asked. And there are other stress-points in doing digital work; one of the major ones is the shift towards an attitude and social context which facilitate what we currently regard as plagiarism. It is a potential problem, as I have discussed.
The great opening of information that digital work performs does set up a climate in which anyone can access and contribute to information, and the concepts of ownership of ideas and the receipt of credit for articulating them are becoming more contested. That Fish makes claims that grate is not a reason to reject him out of hand; he does make a number of good points, and even when he does not, the fact that he does pose questions, that he compels them and the defense of ideas that they entail, is a good thing. One of the tenets of critical thinking, that chimera we are exhorted to pursue in our classrooms, is that one must question ideas and claims, and in the questioning, they are either strengthened or shown to merit being discarded--an idea DePalma lays out quite succinctly in his article.
That he says what he says is not the problem. What he says can be argued against--and any scholar should expect that there will be argument against it. Certainly, Fish's position against the value of the digital humanities is argued against. Purdy and Walker, for example, assert the need to integrate digital scholarship into the rubrics used for hiring, promotion, and tenure, noting that it is "often more likely than print to be read and used" (190). Their position is hardly in line with that of Fish. In addition, Profession 2011 gives as much of itself to discussion of digital scholarship as Profession 2009 devotes to Fish, and it would not likely do so were there not something to discuss about the matter. In it, Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen make the point early on that "humanities disciplines must find ways not simply of evaluating but also of valuing digital scholarship" (123). The position is one more or less diametrically opposed to that Fish outlines in his New York Times piece, and it is one supported by a number of other scholars. Excellent speller Geoffrey Rockwell, for instance, remarks on the potential for the development of new modes of inquiry by digital scholarship, viewing it as one of the assets of digital work (154-55). Jerome McGann, whose “On Creating a Usable Future” I have discussed, even asserts digital scholarship as a potential corrective to the crisis in which the academic humanities currently find themselves. It is hardly a condemnation of the field of study.
No, the problem is not that he says what he says. The problem is where he says what he says.*
Many people read the New York Times, whether in printed or online format, and so Fish is positioned to be able to address a wide audience through writing for it. The position is one that not many in academia have; most of us speak to our students and our colleagues about our work and the views we come to have through it, and we try to publish articles and books, but in reality few people outside the academic establishment (and not as many within it as should be the case) pay attention to what goes on within the walls of the proverbial ivory tower. The affairs of those descended from Chaucer's Clerk do not often penetrate the perceptions of the bulk of people in the United States, something I think I have commented on before (here, here, here, and here, if not elsewhere). So what Fish writes has the opportunity to exert disproportionate influence on popular perception of the work done by those in the humanities. When he decides to condemn a field of study, then, he does more than simply express a divergent opinion of scholarly discipline--which he is certainly within his rights to do, both as a human being and as a scholar. He marshals opposition to the ability of others to do their work--and in that, he undermines himself, for in saying that any one of us working in the academic humanities is wasting time to no good purpose, the accusation that any others of us, or even all of us, are similarly wasteful becomes not just possible but viable.
After all, if even our own are calling into question whether or not the work we do is actually worth doing as a field, as opposed to simply disagreeing about results or specific methods...
Works Cited**
~Bizzell, Patricia. "Composition Studies Saves the World!" Profession 2009 (2009): 94-98. Print.
~Culler, Johnathan. "Writing to Provoke." Profession 2009 (2009): 84-88. Print.
~DePalma, Michael-John. "Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching: A Pragmatic Response to the Challenge of Belief." CCC 63.2 (December 2011): 219-43. Print.
~Fish, Stanley. "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation." NYTimes.com. New York Times, 23 January 2010. Web. 24 January 2012.
~McGann, Jerome. “On Creating a Usable Future.” Profession 2011 (2011): 182-95. Print.
~Purdy, James P., and Joyce R. Walker. "Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work." Profession 2010 (2010): 177-95. Print.
~Rockwell, Geoffrey. "On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship." Profession 2011 (2011): 152-68. Print.
~Schreibman, Susan, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen. Introduction. Profession 2011 (2011): 123-35. Print.
*I understand that this comment is somewhat problematic. I think I explain the reasoning behind it in the following paragraph, but I do know that I appear to tread dangerously close to advocating censorship. For the record, here as often, I am not generally in favor of restricting speech, particularly academic speech (do I need to make a full disclosure statement here?). Fish has every right to voice his opinion, and he goes to great length to support that opinion, so that he is exercising sufficiently due diligence--even if he is wrong. And the Times has the right to print what it pleases, both as an instrument of "the press" and as a business providing a product. That does not mean that I have to be happy, or that I in fact am happy, to have seen it pop up where it did. There is a lot of potential for damage in it, and since I am one of those who may be damaged by it, I think I have the right to express my displeasure at the decision no less than did Fish and the Times to make it.
**I am aware of the irony of my employing a preponderance of print sources in discussing digital scholarship. Many of my sources, however, discuss the necessity of interplay between traditional print and new digital media. I hope to be aligned with the practice current research suggests is preferable.
Friday, December 3, 2010
20101203.1248
Amidst meetings with students regarding their grades and why what they turned in to me is, in fact, plagiarism, I have been looking back over some blog entries my friends and I have made. The perspective is quite nice, and I enjoy the kinds of comments that get exchanged.
I also enjoy the occasional text-message, such as one I received from my lovely and surpassingly excellent wife just now. She writes* that a student of hers offered up the funniest and most inadvertently astute misspelling: "If we want to sell imported whine, we would have to find where the rich people live."
Aside from the joke embedded in it--one that I found especially funny, given my experience with the wealthy in my hometown--the comment reminds me of an article from College English 73.2 (November 2010), Cathryn Molloy's "The Malcliché: An Argument for and Unlikely Episteme." In the article, Molloy argues that the misuse of the much-maligned cliché is a way to "transcend uncertainty in ways that make our mortality a bit more tolerable" (147), one that is valuable because its unintentional origin reveals much about the perceptions the utterer has of social structures (146, 149, 151). While I am unsure that there needs to be a new label for the phenomenon (is not what Molloy, following Freedman (139), calls the malcliché already subsumed by the definition of "malapropism?"), I do find myself at least partly convinced by the argument, generally.
What, then, is revealed about the student who errs this way? What is revealed of my wife and myself, who both found the incident funny enough to relate? What is revealed of the reader who reads this, whatever the reaction of that reader may be?
*Is "writes" the correct verb to use to refer to text messages? Should it be "texts," or "messages," perhaps? I do not know, and I would welcome input.
I also enjoy the occasional text-message, such as one I received from my lovely and surpassingly excellent wife just now. She writes* that a student of hers offered up the funniest and most inadvertently astute misspelling: "If we want to sell imported whine, we would have to find where the rich people live."
Aside from the joke embedded in it--one that I found especially funny, given my experience with the wealthy in my hometown--the comment reminds me of an article from College English 73.2 (November 2010), Cathryn Molloy's "The Malcliché: An Argument for and Unlikely Episteme." In the article, Molloy argues that the misuse of the much-maligned cliché is a way to "transcend uncertainty in ways that make our mortality a bit more tolerable" (147), one that is valuable because its unintentional origin reveals much about the perceptions the utterer has of social structures (146, 149, 151). While I am unsure that there needs to be a new label for the phenomenon (is not what Molloy, following Freedman (139), calls the malcliché already subsumed by the definition of "malapropism?"), I do find myself at least partly convinced by the argument, generally.
What, then, is revealed about the student who errs this way? What is revealed of my wife and myself, who both found the incident funny enough to relate? What is revealed of the reader who reads this, whatever the reaction of that reader may be?
*Is "writes" the correct verb to use to refer to text messages? Should it be "texts," or "messages," perhaps? I do not know, and I would welcome input.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
20101116.1554
I have a little bit of time in which I am done with the grading I needed to do, class doesn't start for a while and is already prepped, and my dissertation stuff is elsewhere so that I need not feel guilty for not working on it. Hence, I make little notes.
I gave my students last week time in class to work on the next papers they have due for me. Some complained about this, which I fully expected; there is not one damned thing that a teacher can do that SOME students will not complain about. But I did not anticipate one of the complaints at all.
I forget the exact words the student used, but they amounted to a protest that the student had nothing at all to say without being able to go and look up information.
I found the complaint particularly disturbing.
There are a number of problems with the information-saturated environment in which a great many of the students now in college (and in my classes) grew up. Among them, perhaps most notably among them, are the shifts in the notions of what intellectual property and academic honesty are. I worry, though, that there is the additional detriment to students coming to have some kind of pride and investment in their own work.
A great many of the students at the school where I teach already have issues with academia. Many of them have been told that they have or have had no place in any kind of schooling. While it must be admitted that there are quite a few who used to or still do conduct themselves in ways that indicate they do not belong in the academic environment (and there are such students), there are many more who have moved past that point or who were wrongly told it to begin with. They already are unsure of themselves and whether or not they actually have anything worth contributing to the ongoing discussion that is academic writing; that lack of surety serves as a prod to plagiarism and all kinds of other things that those of us who teach decry.
I think my worry understandable. And I am moved to pity.
I gave my students last week time in class to work on the next papers they have due for me. Some complained about this, which I fully expected; there is not one damned thing that a teacher can do that SOME students will not complain about. But I did not anticipate one of the complaints at all.
I forget the exact words the student used, but they amounted to a protest that the student had nothing at all to say without being able to go and look up information.
I found the complaint particularly disturbing.
There are a number of problems with the information-saturated environment in which a great many of the students now in college (and in my classes) grew up. Among them, perhaps most notably among them, are the shifts in the notions of what intellectual property and academic honesty are. I worry, though, that there is the additional detriment to students coming to have some kind of pride and investment in their own work.
A great many of the students at the school where I teach already have issues with academia. Many of them have been told that they have or have had no place in any kind of schooling. While it must be admitted that there are quite a few who used to or still do conduct themselves in ways that indicate they do not belong in the academic environment (and there are such students), there are many more who have moved past that point or who were wrongly told it to begin with. They already are unsure of themselves and whether or not they actually have anything worth contributing to the ongoing discussion that is academic writing; that lack of surety serves as a prod to plagiarism and all kinds of other things that those of us who teach decry.
I think my worry understandable. And I am moved to pity.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
20100901.0827
This article brings up an interesting issue of ownership of a major artwork. Aside from the value of it being one of the recognized major works (I'll leave discussing what counts as "major" for another time), it does bear in on questions of plagiarism which I have discussed before. Since a new semester is starting soon, I'll likely be forced to deal with the issue again. Also, concerns of cultural management pop up.
To summarize from the article, David, lodged in Florence's Accademia Gallery, was held to belong specifically to Florence. Recently, however, Italian federal officials have claimed that the statue is the property of Italy generally and not of one of its cities, specifically. Others are making counter-claims, citing economic issues that the federal government dismisses. The issue of ownership, however, seems less important in popular imagination than the issue of access.
That last, that ownership is less important than access, seems to be a prevailing attitude among students I have had. There seems to be at work the ease of access is inversely proportional to the force of ownership, so that the easier it is to find something, the less important it is that someone actually has ownership of that thing. And while it is true that theft of ideas is not the same as theft of physical property (since taking an idea does not remove it from the place of its original holding, as physical theft does), the idea that ease of access equals diminished ownership means that idea-theft is increasingly not seen as theft by students, but is simply the use of a resource that is open to all.
I do not have any problem with using available public resources. Lord knows that I use them enough, myself. But I try to be responsible in that use, as do many people. A number of students, however, fail to see that use needs to be responsible. And it is not just in their papers that this is so; look at the subways and sidewalks in New York City, see the people cast their waste (not all of it discarded packaging) about themselves, and tell me that they are responsible. Hell, even in "Don't Mess with" Texas, litter lines the sides of the roads and highways.
Anyway.
As far as cultural management goes, Povoledo notes that resistance to new policies intended to increase access to cultural and historical fixtures "has been very vocal, both from within ministry ranks, as well as from members of the cultural intelligentsia who fear over-commercialization." This seems to me to be very much in keeping with ideas reported by Levine in Highbrow/lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (with thanks to Professor Jennifer Vaught for pointing out the source to me). In the text, Levine remarks that there was a major disjunction in the perception by the people of the United States as to what constituted "high" culture and who should have access to it. Efforts--largely successful, as it happens--were made to restrict access to such things as Shakespeare and Mozart to the upper socioeconomic strata; after the more-or-less solid appropriation of them, attempts to democratize access (largely through "we need to educate the masses" ideas) met with resistance as potentially destructive to the "real" cultural importance of things.
I am not convinced of that truth. For if it is the cast that the vast majority will not "get the point" (which is itself doubtful), assuming that a given percentage of the population at large will "understand" what is going on, allowing more people access will increase the number of those who are able to "get it."
I just hope that they think to credit their sources.
To summarize from the article, David, lodged in Florence's Accademia Gallery, was held to belong specifically to Florence. Recently, however, Italian federal officials have claimed that the statue is the property of Italy generally and not of one of its cities, specifically. Others are making counter-claims, citing economic issues that the federal government dismisses. The issue of ownership, however, seems less important in popular imagination than the issue of access.
That last, that ownership is less important than access, seems to be a prevailing attitude among students I have had. There seems to be at work the ease of access is inversely proportional to the force of ownership, so that the easier it is to find something, the less important it is that someone actually has ownership of that thing. And while it is true that theft of ideas is not the same as theft of physical property (since taking an idea does not remove it from the place of its original holding, as physical theft does), the idea that ease of access equals diminished ownership means that idea-theft is increasingly not seen as theft by students, but is simply the use of a resource that is open to all.
I do not have any problem with using available public resources. Lord knows that I use them enough, myself. But I try to be responsible in that use, as do many people. A number of students, however, fail to see that use needs to be responsible. And it is not just in their papers that this is so; look at the subways and sidewalks in New York City, see the people cast their waste (not all of it discarded packaging) about themselves, and tell me that they are responsible. Hell, even in "Don't Mess with" Texas, litter lines the sides of the roads and highways.
Anyway.
As far as cultural management goes, Povoledo notes that resistance to new policies intended to increase access to cultural and historical fixtures "has been very vocal, both from within ministry ranks, as well as from members of the cultural intelligentsia who fear over-commercialization." This seems to me to be very much in keeping with ideas reported by Levine in Highbrow/lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (with thanks to Professor Jennifer Vaught for pointing out the source to me). In the text, Levine remarks that there was a major disjunction in the perception by the people of the United States as to what constituted "high" culture and who should have access to it. Efforts--largely successful, as it happens--were made to restrict access to such things as Shakespeare and Mozart to the upper socioeconomic strata; after the more-or-less solid appropriation of them, attempts to democratize access (largely through "we need to educate the masses" ideas) met with resistance as potentially destructive to the "real" cultural importance of things.
I am not convinced of that truth. For if it is the cast that the vast majority will not "get the point" (which is itself doubtful), assuming that a given percentage of the population at large will "understand" what is going on, allowing more people access will increase the number of those who are able to "get it."
I just hope that they think to credit their sources.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
20100803.0844
Plagiarism has been much on my mind lately, as I think I may have noted. As I have spoken with my colleagues, I have found that many of them are reporting things similar to my experience; students are doing things that we call "cheating" openly and in many cases unabashedly. And that is not a comfortable situation for anyone--instructors are placed in a position to have to confront students, and students are forced either to admit their errors (not a bad thing, but not an easy one for any of us) or contest the instructor's judgment (which, since many of us use Google as well as did the student who cheated, is usually not an easy thing to do).
It was with some interest, then, that I read this article, in which Trip Gabriel discusses the increased incidence of plagiaristic behavior at even the higher levels of undergraduate academia. Perhaps I am something of a romantic, but it seems to me that there is something gravely wrong when top-notch institutions--whose students are supposedly academically socialized to a great extent--suffer from the same sort of rash of cut-and-paste, get-it-done-easily-and-move-on-quickly mentality that is found at other institutions where such a production-based mindset is more expected.
Leaving aside the problems inherent in the idea that there are institutions of higher learning where "getting done" is the accepted method of progress (and the hierarchical academia that idea entails), I cannot help but wonder if the reliance, in papers as well as "creative" works, on "sampling" does not point to some degree of stultification. I well realize that my wondering smacks of curmudgeonly in-my-dayism, that it falls firmly in line with the traditional "kids these days" complaint. But there is something worrying about the idea that the "remix" is an independent creative product.
I admit, though, that I am very much a product of my upbringing and education, both of which have been very much in keeping with the "traditional" American idea of white-middle-class-as-norm.
I admit also that the idea of the remix is an old one. Medieval English literature, for example, is replete with examples of recastings of older stories. Indeed, the focal work of my current research, Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, is in most of its text an adaptation of other sources--where it is not an outright copy-over of them (as is pointed out by Vinaver, among others). Chaucer, the veritable parent of English literature, recasts stories in several of his more famous pieces (Troilus and Boece come to mind). And there is the old adage that Shakespeare himself was an inveterate plagiarist (to which I append for my students, "When you write as well as Shakespeare, you, too, may plagiarize. Not an instant before."). Their evidence asserts that copying is not a barrier to artistry, even enduringly high artistic achievement. And it follows that it may not be a barrier to serious academic inquiry.
But.
Even if a number of older, respected artists (and scholars, no doubt) made their way by taking freely from what they found before them, they did more than simply regurgitate it wholesale. Malory, who keeps lines of his sources intact, often writes of "the frenssh booke," and where he fails to, he nonetheless recasts language and events in such a way as to significantly alter the thrust of the stories he relates. Chaucer acts similarly, freshening his re-settings by casting them into different verse-forms. And Shakespeare's contributions are too numerous for me to list.
Who among the samplers, remixers, and plagiarists at work now do so much with what they take up?
Works Cited
~Malory, Thomas. Malory: Complete Works. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 2nd ed. New York, Oxford UP, 1978. Print.
~Vinaver, Eugène. Introduction. Malory: Complete Works. By Thomas Malory. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. v-x. Print.
It was with some interest, then, that I read this article, in which Trip Gabriel discusses the increased incidence of plagiaristic behavior at even the higher levels of undergraduate academia. Perhaps I am something of a romantic, but it seems to me that there is something gravely wrong when top-notch institutions--whose students are supposedly academically socialized to a great extent--suffer from the same sort of rash of cut-and-paste, get-it-done-easily-and-move-on-quickly mentality that is found at other institutions where such a production-based mindset is more expected.
Leaving aside the problems inherent in the idea that there are institutions of higher learning where "getting done" is the accepted method of progress (and the hierarchical academia that idea entails), I cannot help but wonder if the reliance, in papers as well as "creative" works, on "sampling" does not point to some degree of stultification. I well realize that my wondering smacks of curmudgeonly in-my-dayism, that it falls firmly in line with the traditional "kids these days" complaint. But there is something worrying about the idea that the "remix" is an independent creative product.
I admit, though, that I am very much a product of my upbringing and education, both of which have been very much in keeping with the "traditional" American idea of white-middle-class-as-norm.
I admit also that the idea of the remix is an old one. Medieval English literature, for example, is replete with examples of recastings of older stories. Indeed, the focal work of my current research, Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, is in most of its text an adaptation of other sources--where it is not an outright copy-over of them (as is pointed out by Vinaver, among others). Chaucer, the veritable parent of English literature, recasts stories in several of his more famous pieces (Troilus and Boece come to mind). And there is the old adage that Shakespeare himself was an inveterate plagiarist (to which I append for my students, "When you write as well as Shakespeare, you, too, may plagiarize. Not an instant before."). Their evidence asserts that copying is not a barrier to artistry, even enduringly high artistic achievement. And it follows that it may not be a barrier to serious academic inquiry.
But.
Even if a number of older, respected artists (and scholars, no doubt) made their way by taking freely from what they found before them, they did more than simply regurgitate it wholesale. Malory, who keeps lines of his sources intact, often writes of "the frenssh booke," and where he fails to, he nonetheless recasts language and events in such a way as to significantly alter the thrust of the stories he relates. Chaucer acts similarly, freshening his re-settings by casting them into different verse-forms. And Shakespeare's contributions are too numerous for me to list.
Who among the samplers, remixers, and plagiarists at work now do so much with what they take up?
Works Cited
~Malory, Thomas. Malory: Complete Works. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 2nd ed. New York, Oxford UP, 1978. Print.
~Vinaver, Eugène. Introduction. Malory: Complete Works. By Thomas Malory. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. v-x. Print.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
20100718.1721
I more or less took today to myself. I've been doing a lot of running around recently, and I figured that I could stand to take a day to rest; I feel like I'll be very well able to get back to work in earnest tomorrow.
One of the things that I do when I rest is read. I'll not restate my love of text (again at the moment), but I do generally find reading to be a pleasant activity. And even when I do run across things that prompt strong responses from me, such as this article, I enjoy the sensation.
As I read Staples's article earlier this afternoon, I found myself more or less in agreement with what he discusses. I have already had several cut-and-paste plagiarists in my writing classes this semester. In most of the cases, the offending students simply did not know that 1) they were supposed cite information that they get from the Internet, and 2) that their assignments needed to be their writing, rather than a collage of source materials formatted neatly (not that most format their papers according to the standards I enforce, but that is a different issue).
Regarding the former, I find that a lot of students simply do not realize that information taken from the Internet requires citation. The typical reaction from a student upon being confronted with the zero that plagiarism receives from me is something like "But it's on the Internet. Doesn't that mean the everybody owns it?" While I do acknowledge that ownership of information is a thorny issue--something that this article, among many others, speaks to--I do not see citation so much as confirming or denying ownership as a mark of respect for the person or people who went to the trouble of assembling the material being employed. This is particularly true in the cases of older works that have passed into the public domain and are "common property"; all of us really do own the work, at least in a legal sense, but we ought to at least pay lip service to the effort that went into constructing that material.
Some of the reasoning behind the latter type of behavior, the cut-and-paste-and-from-sources-only approach to writing for school, is in the academic socialization enforced upon the students in the past. There are in my experience a number of instructors at several academic levels who oblige their students to do nothing in their "research papers" except compile and summarize information. While it is very much true that being able to find and condense information is a valuable skill in the academy and outside it, the development of knowledge depends on more than simply grabbing data and putting it together. At the very least, it requires looking at the data and extrapolating from it; unless at least that minimal step is taken, all that is being accomplished is rote recitation--a task at which almost any contemporary computer vastly exceeds almost any human.
That I say so does not mean that I am against the computer or its use in scholastic research--indeed, I am very much for both. But I do not believe that the machine or its employment ought to stand in the place of identifying an idea and explicating both the information that gives rise to it and the process by which said information does so. I am not at all certain that it can.
I am also not at all certain that Staples's final call for the preservation of "the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally" can be adequately answered. Rather, I think that new methods for doing so need to be developed. And there is already quite a bit of work--some of it quite good--being done in classrooms throughout the United States and outside it. There is also, unfortunately but unavoidably, quite a bit of shitty work being done in that regard.
The task before us, then, is to identify and expand upon those methods which are successful and valid, looking into why they are successful and why the others are not.
Addenda
July 22, 2010
I caught a flagrant plagiarist yesterday; the student's entire paper, down to the line-breaks, had been cut-and-pasted from one of four websites. One of those websites, evidently, is Cheathouse.com. Pretty obvious, really...
July 23,2010
I just spent a couple of hours grading papers, though for a different class. Three more students plagiarized. I understand that the end of the term is at hand, but I have spoken with their class at great length about the need for citation--as well as for doing one's own work, since cut-and-paste or copy-over jobs like those I caught today are not exactly the same as missing a citation.
One of the things that I do when I rest is read. I'll not restate my love of text (again at the moment), but I do generally find reading to be a pleasant activity. And even when I do run across things that prompt strong responses from me, such as this article, I enjoy the sensation.
As I read Staples's article earlier this afternoon, I found myself more or less in agreement with what he discusses. I have already had several cut-and-paste plagiarists in my writing classes this semester. In most of the cases, the offending students simply did not know that 1) they were supposed cite information that they get from the Internet, and 2) that their assignments needed to be their writing, rather than a collage of source materials formatted neatly (not that most format their papers according to the standards I enforce, but that is a different issue).
Regarding the former, I find that a lot of students simply do not realize that information taken from the Internet requires citation. The typical reaction from a student upon being confronted with the zero that plagiarism receives from me is something like "But it's on the Internet. Doesn't that mean the everybody owns it?" While I do acknowledge that ownership of information is a thorny issue--something that this article, among many others, speaks to--I do not see citation so much as confirming or denying ownership as a mark of respect for the person or people who went to the trouble of assembling the material being employed. This is particularly true in the cases of older works that have passed into the public domain and are "common property"; all of us really do own the work, at least in a legal sense, but we ought to at least pay lip service to the effort that went into constructing that material.
Some of the reasoning behind the latter type of behavior, the cut-and-paste-and-from-sources-only approach to writing for school, is in the academic socialization enforced upon the students in the past. There are in my experience a number of instructors at several academic levels who oblige their students to do nothing in their "research papers" except compile and summarize information. While it is very much true that being able to find and condense information is a valuable skill in the academy and outside it, the development of knowledge depends on more than simply grabbing data and putting it together. At the very least, it requires looking at the data and extrapolating from it; unless at least that minimal step is taken, all that is being accomplished is rote recitation--a task at which almost any contemporary computer vastly exceeds almost any human.
That I say so does not mean that I am against the computer or its use in scholastic research--indeed, I am very much for both. But I do not believe that the machine or its employment ought to stand in the place of identifying an idea and explicating both the information that gives rise to it and the process by which said information does so. I am not at all certain that it can.
I am also not at all certain that Staples's final call for the preservation of "the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally" can be adequately answered. Rather, I think that new methods for doing so need to be developed. And there is already quite a bit of work--some of it quite good--being done in classrooms throughout the United States and outside it. There is also, unfortunately but unavoidably, quite a bit of shitty work being done in that regard.
The task before us, then, is to identify and expand upon those methods which are successful and valid, looking into why they are successful and why the others are not.
Addenda
July 22, 2010
I caught a flagrant plagiarist yesterday; the student's entire paper, down to the line-breaks, had been cut-and-pasted from one of four websites. One of those websites, evidently, is Cheathouse.com. Pretty obvious, really...
July 23,2010
I just spent a couple of hours grading papers, though for a different class. Three more students plagiarized. I understand that the end of the term is at hand, but I have spoken with their class at great length about the need for citation--as well as for doing one's own work, since cut-and-paste or copy-over jobs like those I caught today are not exactly the same as missing a citation.
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