Word Theft

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/247130

by danso • 13 years ago

19 19 13 years ago

danso3• 13 years ago

A few things stick out to me from the hacker's perspective:

1. Poetry seems like a medium that is inherently difficult not to plagiarize. Unlike regular prose or journalism, you don't have the room to do gracefully do attribution (e.g. "According to the Times, two roads diverged in a yellow wood") and the shortness of the phrase necessarily reduces the space you have to make something unique.

2. It's great to be involved in an intellectual pursuit, like open source software, where copying and remixing is not only encouraged, but is a best practice.

3. It says a lot about the ephemeral state and nature of poetry that someone could plagiarize Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, in this age of Google, and almost get away with it.

edit: poor wording on my part. I meant more that it's difficult to avoid unintentionally plagiarizing, in that the form of the medium seems to make it difficult to show that you were trying to "remix" (speaking from a layperson's perspective). The examples given in the OP seem to obviously be ripping off, though.

But yes, it also seems from a layperson's perspective that there would be collisions in how things could be expressed...but I'm thinking as a layperson who doesn't appreciate all the ways that poetry can break common rules of language and expression.

1stop• 13 years ago

... What constraints are on poetry that make it difficult to not plagerise? Are you suggesting there is a finite amount of expression in language?

danso3• 13 years ago

Theoretically there may be infinite ways to construct a string of words, but practically, there may be collisions in the kind of things you want to actually express. With poetry, there is an additional reduced physical space to reword things...Arguably, there's an increased artistic space, though, as you aren't restricted by the normal bounds of grammar and language.

tbirdz• 13 years ago

I think the commenter was referring to the literary device of allusion, where one poem could make a reference to another poem or other literary work by quoting it directly or paraphrasing, maybe even subverting the original context to create a different kind of effect. However, citations could become difficult, as the language associated with them could harm the poem's flow and make it more awkward.

One solution I have seen to this though, is various annotated editions of poems which add footnotes to explain various references, things specific to that author's culture or time period etc. However, while these are certainly informative, they can be a bit distracting from the poem itself.

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

Being incapable of originality and being compelled to plagiarise are very different.

onion2k• 13 years ago

Plagiarism checking software exists. Universities use it all the time. Surely, with a relatively narrow corpus of work like poetry, this is a trivial problem to solve.

danso3• 13 years ago

Apparently the poetry field may rely on more rudimentary detection methods and so there's probably still a lot of low-hanging fruit

http://rochfordstreetreview.com/2013/09/20/f-for-fake-poetry...

According to media reports one of the judges, Anthony Lawrence, became suspicious and, with the help of another judge (M T C Cronin) started googling lines from Slattery’s poem. They discovered that about four-fifths of the lines appeared to be the work of other poets.

TeMPOraL2• 13 years ago

Plagiarism checking software exists. Universities use it all the time.

From what my university professor told me (and some student friends of mine, who had their works checked by such software on regular basis), plagiarism checking software is mostly a joke (or a scam, depending on how you look at it), and is bought so that the university can tell that they are "employing best available methods of plagiarism-protection" when applying for government money. At least, this is how it works in Poland.

michaelt• 13 years ago

Plagarism detection software like Turnitin certainly catches some people, based on my experience sitting next to someone who used it at a major university. If anything it produced too many false positives.

I don't know how big their corpus of poems is though.

Tycho2• 13 years ago

Look at it like this: you could catch many instances of undergraduate plagiarism if you a) google searched passages of submitted essays/disertations and b) cross-checked all submitted papers against each other (including previous years). Anyone can do this with no special tools, but systems like Turnitin automate the process. So I don't see how it could be a joke/scam (maybe if it's outrageously expensive). It also has other features like making sure students have used citations/references correctly.

aestra• 13 years ago

Interestingly when I was in high school (back in the somewhat early(ish) days of the web) we had an assignment in some English class to do some kind of writing and then copy it and distribute it to the class and read it aloud. This didn't have to be typed, almost everyone did it hand written, just had to be photocopied. I don't remember the topic of the writing at all.

Someone handed out a paper that looked excellent, I read it before he read it aloud, and I didn't believe he wrote it. It was too good and seemed above something a high schooler would write. I changed my mind and believe he wrote it when he read it aloud because the way he read it, he owned it. He read it just like it was something he wrote himself. After he was done the teacher said "that was good, but you didn't write this, you downloaded this from the Internet." She didn't ask him, she didn't check, she just publicly accused him. He looked shocked and said "No I didn't!" where she just kept insisting he did without any proof whatsoever except that the paper was just good. She may have just blindly failed him on the assignment.

Off topic but other student in this assignment handed out another paper which was full of misspellings and grammatical errors. Absolutely chock full of them, to the point you could hardly read it. After she read it, the teacher said "there's a lot of misspellings" to which she protested "my computer doesn't have spellcheck." She really thought this was a legitimate excuse, in English class. Like not having spellcheck excuses you from 1) proofreading and 2) picking up and old fashioned paper dictionary.

robmclarty2• 13 years ago

Funny. I had a similar experience myself in art class in high school. The assignment was to take a photo from a magazine and reproduce its likeness with pencil and paper. I must have just had good shape and spacial recognition because the drawing I made just happened to be approximately the same size and proportions of the magazine photo I was using as reference and, so, the teacher accused me of simply tracing it. I got a zero on the assignment and was accused of being a hack in front of all my peers even though I drew it freehand, from sight (the way we were instructed).

IMHO there's too much emphasis placed on doing things the "right" way and not enough on actually getting things done. Even if I did simply trace the photo, I still would have had a learning experience, engaging pencil, hand, and paper and understanding a bit more about how they work (to me, the purpose of the assignment). Regardless of how a thing is made, if it actually gets made and gets into other people's heads and gives them an experience worth having, I think it has done its job.

I took up my dispute with the vice-principle along with my parents and redid the assignment on thick, opaque card-stock (that couldn't possibly be used to trace through) and reproduced another photo with just as much accuracy. I went on to attend art school and win illustration awards despite my horrible experiences with art in high school, but I worry that another student might have abandoned their pursuit of art and deprived the world of their creativity, given such negative feedback. I feel we all need to lighten up a bit.

userbinator• 13 years ago

Plagiarism isn’t a crime

milliams• 13 years ago

...is a civil offence I believe.

fennecfoxen• 13 years ago

Depending on what you do with it, there can also be Fraud.

gabemart• 13 years ago

The Paisley Rekdal poem referenced in the beginning of the article is "Bats" [1].

Can anyone find a copy of the plagiarized version by Christian Ward? I'd be very interested in seeing it.

[1] http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19501

Word Theft

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