Monday, January 18, 2010
Tenner Response
After reading Edward Tenner’s Technology Review of “The Rise of the Plagiosphere,” it made me think of the meaning of originality. Tenner writes about the different ways technology has increased the detection of plagiarism in the form of word for word verbatim as well as paraphrasing. He points out three ways of detection: web-crawlers, text comparison software, and “techniques for identifying no verbatim similarity between documents to make possible the detection of no verbatim plagiarism.” Thus in the future the use of plagiarism will be highly detectable. However, what is really an original piece of writing? Over time the chances of people using the same phrase or two in a particular paper will arise. Is this coincidence or is this plagiarism? If I write in a blog that I cannot wait to start my day today because it’s beautiful and sunny; and another person writes the same sentence on their blog a couple weeks later is that a coincidence or plagiarism? That’s why Tenner’s review makes me think of our research question. What is multimedia writing originality?
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I had some of the same conclusions from Tenner's article as you did. And I was concerned about academic papers having the coincidence on the same sentence or two, let alone the whole idea of originality. Your response got me thinking even more about not only plagiarism but what really constitutes what is an original work.
ReplyDeleteI started my blog almost exactly the same that you did, and in my blog I talk about how it could be very possible to have the same thoughts after reading something and writing something very similar. It's kind of interesting that in the same class we got a lot of the same questions from an article.
ReplyDeleteEric, your view of Tenner's piece is accurate. Honestly, I think it is impossible to assume that every bit of writing will be entirely original. Eventually, ideas will seem unoriginal in some aspect...it's just a matter of time.
ReplyDeleteI also wrote my blog on this article but I concentrated on the text comparison software. I noted in my blog that I have already been an innocent victim of this type of software. I happened to have a similar paragraph (in one of my papers) to a paper submitted online to Turnitin, and I ended up getting a 50% on a paper that I DID NOT plagiarize on. To answer one of your questions, I am under the belief that it is NOT plagiarism.
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