Schenectady Synecdoche

Becky,
I am SOOoo glad you put your presentation up on the web and the PowerPoint slides, too! I didn't get to go to the Plagiarism Conference there, although I really needed/wanted to. We just didn't have the money, and I have been very fatigued of late (I have MS and sometimes it really knocks me back), but as I've already told you a few times, I really think you hit the nail on the head in your thinking about plagiarism; every time I read one or hear one of your talks/articles, I feel like smacking my hand against my forehead and saying "of course, that's what we need to think about now in terms of plagiarism!" Sort of an "aha" moment of clarity and common sense. At any rate, you did it again. Sorry I missed it. I'm sure it went off beautifully (and a great conference).

It was a terrific conference. AR and I agreed that we'd like to do a sort of Groundhog Day with it, and relive it several times, so that we might be able to absorb more of what we were encountering. The organizers did a fantastic job, and so did the speakers. I've really never had a conference experience quite like it. They're planning to do a book of proceedings, and that should be pretty darned interesting. But it won't, alas, have Larry Lessig's PowerPoint, which was a masterpiece of conceptual and technical design. I was adulatory--while laughing till it hurt.

Senioritis writes "John P. Lesko single-handedly adjudicates plagiarism cases and publishes his conclusions . . ."

Please, I cannot take complete credit for "single-handedly adjudicat[ing] plagiarism cases".

What I am trying to do is to popularize some of the more famous allegations of plagiarism which have been made over the years. My "Famous Plagiarist Research Project" is a database in progress of such cases, but I do not "adjudicate" or make any first claims/allegations--I evaluate and assess the allegations based on existing sources (see references at http://www.famousplagiarists.com/books.htm ).

It became apparent to me in the early stages of this project that a system was needed to better classify and categorize the various cases, and this inspired me to come up with the main categories (religion/journalism/pop-fiction . . .) as well as the 5-point scale to indicate how serious the allegations were . . .

. . . while having a bit of fun in the process :) . www.FamousPlagiarists.com is my "rant space", a way to calm what used to be rather frequent fits of "plagiarism paranoia" . . . not really . . . more like a sense of disgust with the many cases of blatant plagiarism across discourse communities.

The new scholarly journal Plagiary (www.plagiary.org), a separate project from the "Famous Plagiarists" work, is more of a professionally targeted as opposed to popular audience targeted work (to get a sense of who else is involved in the Plagiary project see the list of Editorial Advisory Board members at http://www.plagiary.org/board.htm ). The journal follows the "open access" model of publishing and will be published through the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office with journal contents also being made available on the journal homepage at plagiary.org.

The first papers are coming in, and looks like we're good to go with a launch date in January 2006. As the recent conference on plagiarism at the University of Michigan illustrates, there are many scholars and concerned members of various discourse communities who have been thinking and writing about these issues . . .

Thanks for the mention. I'd be happy to corrospond with other scholars and professionals interested in contributing/critiquing/reviewing papers.

John P. Lesko, Editor
Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification
http://www.plagiary.org