Schenectady Synecdoche

I'm liking this article a lot, for several reasons.

First, Marsh takes metaphors seriously. And while he doesn't pursue tropical analysis enough for my taste, he does get on base, e.g., "Turnitin.com—as both a writing assessment tool and a kind of authoring environment itself—reifies identity categories via apparent metaphors disguised as informative educational content" (428).

Second, he analyzes (in greater depth) the complicity of automated plagiarism detection in the efficiency model of education. He specifically references the work of Donna Strickland and Marc Bousquet in this analysis.

Third, he recognizes the participation of the discourse of plagiarism in a cultural system of binary gender.

Fourth, he grounds his analysis of Turnitin in Katherine Hayles' notion of remediation.

My favorite moment in the essay: "[I]n remediating submitted papers, Turnitin.com introduces, as ethical technology, an ethical drug test to which all participants are subjected. Whether guilty or innocent under prevailing ethical codes and textual ownership laws, writers who undergo the test see their writing produced in particular ways by the Turnitin.com remediation machine. In submitting their papers, writers submit to the color-coded reconstruction of their texts and, more profoundly, their identities as writers, insofar as the originality report frames every submission in terms of its program-driven assessment of similarity" (434).