Fascinating Fakery
The introduction of a new online journal devoted to "research articles and reports addressing general and specific issues related to plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification" is certainly the occasion for a post about my own long-standing interest in such topics. The journal is Plagiary and is well worth a look, even if you're not in a profession where such deceptions are of central concern (although I imagine there are few lines of work where it isn't of some importance.)
There are only two papers posted so far (Cases of Plagiarism Handled by the United States Office of Research Integrity 1992-2005 and The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story, both in pdf) but a list of working titles (scroll down) looks really interesting. As someone who read Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 1991 I'm especially interested in "The Da Vinci Code as Borrowed Text". Perhaps even more valuable, at least right now, is their news page.
I'm glad that the journal is dealing with more than just the "culture of plagiarism" signaled by the rash of accusations against well-known scholars and journalists in recent years. The most salient encounters most academics have with plagiarism are students passing off cribbed work as their own. It's certainly meritorious to examine why students seem (and I'd like to stress "seem" because I've seen no data to back up the perception) to be more willing to engage in academic dishonesty of various sorts than in the past. However, I also look forward to some interesting discussion of how the general "attitude" that links plagiarism with other types of fraud and misrepresentation (the likes of Hwang Woo Suk, James Frey, and even the ongoing legal controversy over filesharing) and that might reveal the limits of such charges. I think it's possible that we might find that some practices we are inclined to condemn are actually reasonable responses while some things we don't think of as appropriation might qualify.
posted by Mr. Arkadin at 5:55 PM
1 Comments:
Nice. Plagiarism as a manifestation of cultural borrowing should definitely be a more studied area (maybe it is?). Adorno's Jargon of Authenticity hits the nail on the etc. The anxiety of duplication came into form (I'd say) at the beginning of the industrial revolution--when copying became easy--but oddly not at the onset of the printing press. Although I very likely missed something; I can't imagine that there was no Renaissance anxiety over the "quality" of written and typeset publications. The wild west of early 1900s America allowed a free flow of information without attribution. I'm reminded specifically of the Christian Science texts' wholesale theft from earlier and unknown preachers. And--free associating here--think of the 1960s-70s art movement reactions to art as a commodity as the artist rebelled against galleries. Movements began creating processes (“happenings”) instead of physical artifacts in an attempt to defuse the economics of the product. It didn't work, but the idea of removing the unique value of the artifact *and its copies* certainly arose from the same impulse that denigrates copying.
And think about our argument long ago on what a cover song should be. Definitely part of the question of "what is authentic." Haydn plagiarized himself and others, as did Bach. Today, musical quotes are regarded with greater suspicion possibly because of the ease.
Unrelated tangent: a good, quick book on Templar history is The Murdered Magicians. Great review of the actual history and of how a fabricated history took hold.
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