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September 23, 2005
First day
Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: some interesting moments. I'm too tired for extended, intensive entry, but here are the Greatest Hits of my day.
- Mario Biagioli (Harvard University), "Plagiarism and Authorship in Science": The "most pernicious plagiarism" in the sciences is the denial of authorship that occurs when grant reviewers appropriate the ideas in grant proposals and do the work themselves, before the people who developed the ideas can.
- Michael Grossberg (former editor of the American Historical Review), "History and the Disciplining of Plagiarism": the journal's editorial board wanted manuscripts to continue to be distributed to reviewers in hard copy. They were didn't want manuscripts distributed electronicaly, for fear that the medium would tempt reviewers to appropriate from what they were reading. Grossman believes we have to get beyond the fear of electronic plagiarism and develop new understandings of textuality and plagiarism.
- Daniel Oakrent (former ombudsman, The New York Times), "Journalism and Plagiarism Scandals": Manufacturing data (and of course his case study is Jayson Blair) is worse than plagiarism because plagiarism may have some relation to the truth, whereas fraudulent data inescapably disseminates lies.
- Amy E. Robillard (English, Illinois State University, Normal), "Young Scholars: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices": The decision to cite is not exclusively determined by the application of citation conventions but in part by our relationship to the cited author. What does this mean for comp/rhet scholars' disinclination to cite their students in the way they cite published articles? (Stay tuned for the answer, in the January issue of College English.)
- Kami Day (Johnson County Community College) and Michele Eodice (Writing Center, University of Kansas), "Students Honoring and Acknowledging Each Other": The plagiarist denies participation in a community. We should replace our notion of citation, which is a competitive model of textuality, with a "gift culture" model for classrooms. They're drawing on Lewis Hyde, Marcel Mauss, and Claude Levi-Strauss's anthropological study of gift-giving: the gift must move and circulate.
- Marilyn Randall (French, University of Western Ontario), "Authentic Imitation: Literary Lessons": Why do we expect more of our students than we do of canonized authors such as Shakespeare and Coleridge?
- Anne Berggren (English, University of Michigan): "Does the thesis sentence short circuit student originality?": The thesis statement becomes an articulated item in textbooks in the 1940s, at a time when increasing numbers of students from diverse backgrounds were being educated on the GI Bill, and when composition was increasingly taught by adjunct faculty. The essay front-loaded by a thesis statement is easy to comprehend, hence easy to grade.
Tomorrow, alas, I must work on the PowerPoint for my Sunday presentation and won't be able to hear as many presentations.
Posted by senioritis at September 23, 2005 10:08 PM