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Articles Conference Reviews |
2007C26VieC.26: Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis Clancy Ratliff: “Negotiating and Regulating Plagiarism in Everyday Blogging Practices” Ratliff started with two anecdotes of times her own blog was plagiarized. In the first instance, someone emailed her with the URL of his blog, claiming “he had stolen a few things” from Ratliff’s blog to start his own. She referred to this as “plagiarism as placeholding.” This individual put Ratliff’s text up as a placeholder, then later he wrote his own posts and removed hers. She remarked that she did not find this as irritating as the second instance. In this instance, Ratliff had written a detailed blog post about a first-year composition class she’d wanted to teach, creating copious notes about the course design for this themed class on public health. Her blog included an image within the post. Ratliff found the plagiarized post because the other writer had used Ratliff’s image on the plagiarized blog (she had hotlinked the image). This instance rankled Ratliff; she considered “public shaming” as a response, though she did not go through with that for various reasons. Ratliff then moved on to a different example of plagiarism in blogs, a post on the blog Kuro5hin (www.kuro5hin.org, pronounced “corrosion”) about circumcision. Some of the post was from Wikipedia and other parts were pulled from different sources, including some of the author’s own writing. While the author provided a list of references, the borrowed text within the post was not cited in any way. One response to this post said “nice plagiarism”; Ratliff pointed to this as an instance of “public shaming” in Kuro5hin. Two comments after that one said, respectively, “take it easy” and “Wikipedia is meant to be ‘plagiarized’ too,” explaining that the lack of citation is acceptable given that Kuro5hin is not a formal publication. Finally, Ratliff showcased a plagiarism detection service for individuals with websites/blogs called Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com). Copyscape searches the Web for instances of your writing; Ratliff described how the blog owner for “The Humanity Critic” (http://nappydiatribe.blogspot.com) caught five instances of plagiarism using Copyscape. This service is an interesting avenue for future research: studying Copyscape as a non-academic plagiarism detection service; thinking about how Copyscape differs from Turnitin.com ethically; considering the institutional reach of issues of plagiarism and how they apply to the blogosphere. Ratliff’s PowerPoint presentation is available through Slideshare at this URL: http://www.slideshare.net/Clancy/negotiating-and-regulating-plagiarism-in-everyday-blogging-practices Rebecca Moore Howard: “Troping Plagiarism In The Blogosphere” Howard begins by questioning whether people writing online think differently about plagiarism. She notes that bloggers whose work is plagiarized are in a precarious situation: these bloggers are ranked based on the links to their work and therefore plagiarists get the credit for the bloggers’ content as well as get the audience’s attention. Howard then analyzed metaphors used by bloggers regarding plagiarism. Such metaphors, she notes, point back to the reader, calling them to action, framing their roles in a system of criminal justice. She quotes Richard Posner: “Plagiarism, in the broadest sense … is simply unacknowledged copying, whether of copyrighted or uncopyrighted work.” Posner argues that plagiarism is deceitful because it misleads the reader; the reader performs some action, because he or she thinks the plagiarized work is original. This reader, Posner says, would not have performed that action if the truth was known. Howard then focused on the interpolation of the reader in the discourse of blogs. Copyright and plagiarism are separate, she says: “Plagiarism is local and copyright is legal.” She points to several discussions regarding plagiarism on the Web, particularly in blogs:
Howard closes by describing these and similar plagiarism-detection efforts as the creation of an online vigilante culture where “we are all readers of plagiarism ascribed to decry all plagiarism we see.” Sandra Jamieson: “Fraud Narratives And The Anxiety Of Author(Ity)Lessness” Jamieson juxtaposes two recent examples of “fraud narratives”: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and the Lonelygirl15 YouTube saga. But, she poses, are they really the same? A reader would have paid for the text of A Million Little Pieces while Lonelygirl15’s videos were freely available on the Web. Thus, the Lonelygirl15 deception “was different,” says Jamieson. She traces how both of these fraud narratives were outed; both stories broke via blogs. Frey’s book was revealed at The Smoking Gun (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/). Frey appeared on Oprah and admitted he had lied—another instance of public shaming of a plagiarist. LonelyGirl15 was discovered after an individual found Jessica Rose’s MySpace page cached in Google (Jessica Rose is the actress who plays “Bree,” also known as LonelyGirl15). Jamieson argues that “deception in print is worse and the author is at fault,” whereas with online deception, the people who were deceived are to blame and not the person who did the deceiving. In other words, “people should know better about electronic media.” This discussion of fraud narratives in print and online parallels our concerns about print and online plagiarism. In print plagiarism, says Jamieson, teachers are blamed. In online plagiarism, the problem is described as the medium itself, which is seen as “inherently deceptive and at best untrustworthy.” Comments? |