Harry's Place Arts

Cross posted from For All and None:

An interesting article at the BBC website on plagiarism in the internet age begins:

A German minister has resigned after copying huge chunks of his doctoral thesis, while the London School of Economics is probing whether Colonel Gaddafi’s son lifted chunks and used a ghost writer for his own. So is plagiarism out of control?

It’s been a bad week for honest educational endeavour.

The German defence minister has stepped down after being stripped of his 2006 university doctorate thesis for copying large parts of it. The University of Bayreuth had decided Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had lifted whole sections without attribution.

And the LSE is looking into allegations that Colonel Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam plagiarised his PhD thesis.

Also of interest is this article at the Guardian website by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wales writes:

Of course Saif Gaddafi is guilty of far worse than plagiarism. But his history with the LSE is a black mark for the institution, and in particular for the examiners, such as Lord Desai, who approved his thesis. We may be able to forgive them some aspects of this – plagiarism is sometimes notoriously difficult to detect, particularly when you have only a small committee of experts doing the examining…

What we can’t forgive, though, is Lord Desai’s cowardly response to the allegations. Desai urges the LSE not to disown Saif Gaddafi, despite it all. “The man is evil enough – you don’t have to add that he’s a plagiarist as well,” he says. Actually, yes we do need to add that, but not for what it says about him, but for what it says about the lack of institutional controls at the LSE and, perhaps, most other institutions.

I’m not sure if Wales is being entirely fair or not. Certainly, on Lord Desai, what he writes is perfectly valid, but what of institutional controls, or the lack thereof? The BBC article notes:

But over the last decade, academics have spoken out with increasing exasperation over the tide of students using everything from Wikipedia to bespoke essay writing services in pursuit of easy high grades. Universities are involved in a cat and mouse game to stop the plagiarists in their tracks.

In the UK, 98% of universities now use a computer programme called Turnitin to analyse suspicious essays, the company that provides it says.

The software scans text for passages which match a database of 155 million student papers, 110 million documents, and 14 billion web pages. Back in 2006/7, more than 600,000 essays were checked in this way in the UK. By last year, that figure leapt to three million.

The German minister has been mocked as zu Googleberg for his extensive plagiarism  But of course, a matching passage does not necessarily indicate a plagiarist. A scholarly essay is traditionally embroidered with well-chosen quotes and references.

Perhaps what is most worrying is that an apparently increasing number of students (and other writers, for that matter) don’t seem to recognise what plagiarism actually is, or indeed why it is wrong.

The ‘death of the author‘ as a philosophical or theoretical position is one thing, but for many today it seems less that an author cannot be seen to fix the meaning of a text, and more that authors are irrelevant and that texts (and other forms of intellectual property) aren’t someone’s work as such, but are, rather, simply pieces of data that are freely available on the internet and consequently free to ‘borrow’ and ‘share’ at will.

A case of this phenomenon, mentioned in the BBC article, is that of the young German author Helene Hegemann, of which the New York Times writes:

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

In the beginning, her agent, Petra Eggers, said that the critics could not distinguish between the novel’s 16-year-old protagonist and the author. “It’s the other way around now, there’s nothing left,” Ms. Eggers said. “They say that none of these are her own words even.”

Deef Pirmasens, the blogger who discovered the passages taken from “Strobo,” said that he could understand a few words or phrases seeping into the work through inspiration, but that he quickly noticed that there were too many for it to be a coincidence. “To take an entire page from an author, as Helene Hegemann admitted to doing, with only slight changes and without asking the author, I consider that illegitimate,” Mr. Pirmasens said.

Pirmasens is right. It’s one thing to borrow and remake passages from texts to create something new and original (in a similar fashion to remixes and mashups in the music world), but to simply pass off large chunks of another’s work as one’s own is both lazy and dishonest.