Daniel Paul
O'Donnell in his
2008-12-21 blog entry Digital Plagiarism writes several things which made me see some parallels between "normal" renaissance authors' procedures/methods and those of his "digital plagiarists".
Do try to think of
commonplace books, and the times when you where more or less certain that a certain author was using Erasmus's
Adagia (or Zimara's
Tabula) without writing in his text that he was using these texts ...
... . (Of course the practice is older, and Luke tells us nothing about Mary footnoting the
Magnificat ... .)
Quote:the plagiarism I found this year with turnitin involved the much more subtle use of unacknowledged passages, quotations, and argument and at key moments in the students’ papers. In the old days, my students used to plagiarise with a shovel; these students were plagiarising with a scalpel.
(highlighting mine)
Quote:A good blog, unlike a good essay, builds its argument and topic through the artful arrangement and excerpting of usually verbatim material passages from other people’s work—in much the same way that some types of music are based on the original use and combination of digitised sound samples from earlier recordings.
In other forums this method of “argument by quotation” is the norm
(highlighting mine)
(statement by A - commentary by X - statement by B - commentary by Y, - statement by C - commentary by Y, etc.:
J.C. Scaliger, Exercitationes anyone?)
Quote:In the case of our students, the problem this generic difference between the blog and the essay causes is magnified by the way they conduct their research. On the basis of my interviews, it appears to me that most of my first year students now conduct their research and compile their notes primarily by searching the Internet, and, when they find an interesting site, copying and pasting large sections of verbatim quotation into their word processor. Often they include the URL of this material with the quotations; but because you can always find the source of a passage you are quoting from the Internet, it is easy for them to get sloppy. Once this accumulation of material is complete, they then start to add their own contribution to the collection, moving the passages they have collected around and interspacing them with their opinions, arguments, and transitions.
(both some of my own texts and quite a number of the texts I write texts on are written this way (hopefully not "sloppy" though (in the case of my own texts because I try to avoid it, and in the case of the texts I write on because they did write for a differently trained audience: and this continues for quite some time: do compare Michelet's statements on his use of citations only for rare material at the start of his
Renaissance in case you should not remember it anyway)).
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Teaching miscellanea (Read 19244 times)
