Timothy Burke: Evidence Is Old-Fashioned?
[Timothy Burke is a professor of history at Swarthmore College]
So, more wailing and gnashing of teeth about Andrew Breitbart.
The New York Times has a piece on plagiarism that reviews an increasingly prominent argument that contemporary college students simply don’t know that copying the words of another writer verbatim is plagiarism, that they’ve grown up in a different kind of textual environment that will eventually produce new norms for everyone.
I’m sympathetic to certain versions of this claim. I’d agree that many students are taught poorly how to cite online material. I’d agree that there really are new kinds of text-making practices in digital environments that arise out of networked or collective systems for sharing information.
What we’ve come to understand as plagiarism is a relatively short-term consequence of a highly individualized and relatively recent conception of authorship, creativity and property rights. Many years ago, I was surprised to find that 18th and 19th Century European travel writers sometimes committed what I saw as outright plagiarism, reproducing or directly paraphrasing work by an earlier traveller. Over time, I began to realize that for some writers, this was a “best practice”: if you didn’t have time to visit an area along your route, but someone else had, then include what they had to say, but fold it into your own authoritative account.
But I’m enough of a devotee of our recent view of authorship and creativity (and property) to think that the norms established around plagiarism during the 20th Century need some kind of continuing defense, just with sufficient awareness of the changes in textual production and circulation.
What really worries me is what’s happening to the larger purpose of the analytical writing which tempts some to plagiarism. The thing I’m honestly afraid of is that we’ve come to a point where the professional value of learning to build strong arguments based on and determined by a command over solid evidence is in rapid decline....
Read entire article at Easily Distracted? (Blog)
So, more wailing and gnashing of teeth about Andrew Breitbart.
The New York Times has a piece on plagiarism that reviews an increasingly prominent argument that contemporary college students simply don’t know that copying the words of another writer verbatim is plagiarism, that they’ve grown up in a different kind of textual environment that will eventually produce new norms for everyone.
I’m sympathetic to certain versions of this claim. I’d agree that many students are taught poorly how to cite online material. I’d agree that there really are new kinds of text-making practices in digital environments that arise out of networked or collective systems for sharing information.
What we’ve come to understand as plagiarism is a relatively short-term consequence of a highly individualized and relatively recent conception of authorship, creativity and property rights. Many years ago, I was surprised to find that 18th and 19th Century European travel writers sometimes committed what I saw as outright plagiarism, reproducing or directly paraphrasing work by an earlier traveller. Over time, I began to realize that for some writers, this was a “best practice”: if you didn’t have time to visit an area along your route, but someone else had, then include what they had to say, but fold it into your own authoritative account.
But I’m enough of a devotee of our recent view of authorship and creativity (and property) to think that the norms established around plagiarism during the 20th Century need some kind of continuing defense, just with sufficient awareness of the changes in textual production and circulation.
What really worries me is what’s happening to the larger purpose of the analytical writing which tempts some to plagiarism. The thing I’m honestly afraid of is that we’ve come to a point where the professional value of learning to build strong arguments based on and determined by a command over solid evidence is in rapid decline....