My Paper is a Mashup
Tomorrow I will meet with the deans to convene a group to look at policies regarding plagiarism and academic dishonesty. The will be the second group I’ve worked with on this topic in the year I’ve been at Keene State. The most recent policies were approved by the College Senate only last spring.
The new group will mostly be looking at procedures in light of some administrative changes we’ve made recently. That is, what will the roles of the assistant deans and department chairs be in handling plagiarism cases that now begin with the dean of the school?
But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our students create. This is a generation that creates content. Look all over the web. Keene State students are creating serial videos and posting them on YouTube. Other students are blogging their little hearts out. Still others are making music or sending tweets or…wait for it…even writing papers.
One big thing about the content that the millennials are creating is that often the freshest, most original creation is a mashup. Don’t know what a mashup is? First, consult Wikipedia:
- Mashup (web application hybrid), a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source
- Mashup (music), a musical genre of songs that consist entirely of parts of other songs
- Mashup (video), a video that is edited from more than one source to appear as one
Mashups take content from more than one source and brings it together in a uniform whole, often–usually–without attribution. The new work is, well, new so there’s no need for attribution or recognition that the work is different than the sum of its parts. Those in the know will recognize the parts. For those not in the know, it doesn’t really matter.
In this context, academic dishonesty and plagiarism take on new meaning. Actually, they don’t really exist. If I take 10 sources and craft them together into something new, my paper, then the work is mine and not someone else’s. The act of bringing these disparate things together is an act of creation that makes the work that of its author. The new work might be considered commentary on the source material. It might be something completely different. In any case, it’s relation to the source material is irrelevent.
So how do we teach about citing sources and academic integrity in this environment? I don’t think it’s enough simply to publish policies that say, “Your work must be your own, and when it isn’t cite your sources.” For students, their work that brings together other sources IS their own.
We need to draw distinctions. We need to be clearer about the academic pursuit. We also have to realize that we’re still bringing students into a different universe. We need to ground them in ethics and yet not stamp out their creativity.
And for those of you who’ve made it this far, one of my favorite mashups. For most people reading this, the music will be the familiar piece. For the 40 million or so kids who are part of the High School Musical generation, they’ll have no clue who Gloria Gaynor is. But this is something new: Zac Efron Will Survive
One point flowing into this — mashups work well because when they quote, they quote from sources that much of the audience will recognize — hence, much of the intended audience of this will recognize the pieces and see the work of the author in the sewing together of those pieces.
So part of the discussion is the difference between quotation and other less transparent forms of appropriation.
Incidentally my 9 year old daughter’s favorite youtube mashup right now is Harry Potter Does Bananaphone, which combines Harry Potter footage with a 1995 Raffi song.
I’m not sure what the answer is here–plagiarism is a significant problem on our campus (not that Keene State is alone in that). I hate it, but I think your mashup analogy is a good way of understanding some of it. I think I see a little less plagiarism when I have students also hand in tons of informal writing, but that’s a luxury anyone not teaching a writing class probably doesn’t have.
A frustrating problem…but if it’s getting you down, watch Gwen Verdon perform a Fosse-choregraphed dance on a late 60’s Ed Sullivan appearance–set to Unk’s hip hop “Walk It Out.” It’ll lift your spirits.
Fosse Video Now and Then
A related issue: Clarifying rules for making references to material on the web. Jon Udell’s blog tipped me off to programs like webcite: http://webcitation.org/
I am so horrified by much of what our provost wrote that it will take me awhile to sort through it all.
Mel wrote: “The new work is, well, new so there’s no need for attribution or recognition that the work is different than the sum of its parts. Those in the know will recognize the parts. For those not in the know, it doesn’t really matter.”
It really doesn’t matter??? The new work is “new” so there’s no need to CREDIT where its parts came from??? This goes against EVERYTHING we are trying to teach our students about the importance of attribution. How do teachers of the new Thinking & Writing course HONESTLY feel about this? (I’m sorry, it’s very hard for me to be diplomatic about issues like this.)
Mel wrote: “In this context, academic dishonesty and plagiarism take on new meaning. Actually, they don’t really exist. If I take 10 sources and craft them together into something new, my paper, then the work is mine and not someone else’s. The act of bringing these disparate things together is an act of creation that makes the work that of its author. The new work might be considered commentary on the source material. It might be something completely different. In any case, it’s [sic] relation to the source material is irrelevent.”
If you write a paper using 10 sources, it is now yours and you have no responsibility to CREDIT those 10 sources that you used??? What???
I am so appalled, I keep thinking I must have misread or misunderstood something. I feel like our provost has just given our students a license to take whatever they want from wherever they want, mix it all together, call it “my new original work,” not cite anything, and turn it in. Then when the professor says “this is plagiarism and you flunk,” the student can go running to the provost who will undoubtedly give the student an A for being so creative.
Can someone please explain to me how asking students to cite, to credit the work they have used in creating their own so-called original work, is “stamping out their creativity.”
This goes against everything I have been teaching about writing papers for the past 14 years as a grad student TA at Michigan, as an instructor at Michigan, and here at Keene State.
I think there may be some misperception regarding what Mel was saying. As I read his piece, I realized he was speaking from the students’ perspective, the reality they come to us with. For example, I think he is saying that for students “The new work is, well, new so there’s no need for attribution or recognition that the work is different than the sum of its parts. Those in the know will recognize the parts. For those not in the know, it doesn’t really matter.” That is the perception they bring and with which the faculty have to struggle.
They are not used to and likely do not comprehend the need to cite the work of others. They likely perceive that no matter what work they use from others, the work they create is theirs - they see it as theirs. I think what Mel is saying is that when we teach them about academic honesty/dishonesty, we need to understand their starting point. Their starting point is not what ours was, so the comprehension gap is likely to be greater. I definitely do not think he is supporting the student’s right to plaigairize.
It is well documented that over 70% of college students admit to some plaigairizing during their undergraduate years. And yes, it’s true that a few of them may not understand the need to (or how to) cite sources, however, most of them do indeed understand what their middle and high school teachers taught them when they were writing papers in secondary school–all sources, whether directly quoted or paraphrased–must be properly credited.
Mashups are not scholarship. Or is that mashuping?
In student writing, what’s most important is how their research is used to support their own insights. A mashup–cited or not– is nothing more than a data dump and that’s what we need to teach them. Our students need to learn to stake claims and defend them; they need to understand that scholarship is built on the shoulders of predecessors but does not stop there (mashing)–that’s the starting point, as we all know. And so do they. Really. They know. They’ve heard it for years.
These are two separate issues. One is scholarship and plaigarism, while the other is new forms of media and innovative ways to use (and abuse?) these new sources. This is new territory and we are all charting the future.
A good pleace to start with students is by Wayne Booth, et al. Reasearch and scholarship are just that. In the context of college-level writing, mashups are creative, innovative starting points that must be cited. No illegal downloading. You pay for what you take by giving credit.
“Overkill, mate,” said Ron as the elf took one look. Your silence will not protect you. To thine own self be true. “I’ve had enough trouble for a lifetime.”
Rowling, Lorde, Shakespeare, Rowling.
Booth’s book–a canon in the teaching of research writing–is
The Craft of Research
Conversely, the web can be used to teach the students the rules of citation — not in the exact frame that academic scholarship exists in, but in an alternate one likely to be more relevant to their professional lives.
For example, it is bad form on the web to refer to an article that exists on line without linking to it. When we encourage students to publish on the web, instead of keeping their work locked in the classroom, they get to deal with this issue as both a consumer and publisher of writing. When we make students publishers we introduce them to this question first hand — if they used my stuff, why didn’t they link to me?
The wide set of conventions around fair use, citation, extended quotation, etc. around blogging are more likely to be accessible to students. And it’s depressing, but they clearly come (and just as often leave) without the least idea of how to put together a decent piece of online writing.
Interestingly, I happened to post an article on a related issue yesterday, one where the Washington Post hid it’s citation, in the way a blogger would have *never* gotten away with. The post is here.
To me, that’s a potential way into the discussion — discussing the difficulty one has in verifying sources and trusting in attribution when newspapers will not abide by the conventions of blogging where citation via linking is everything….
I KNOW he was saying that this is the students’ point of view; I get that. But he did NOTHING to argue with that point of view. Imagine a student reading this: the provost is basically telling them it is perfectly fine to take 10 sources, mash them together, call it “my original work,” and turn it in expecting the professor to find it acceptable. When the professor doesn’t, all the student has to do is say, “Look, the provost says it is OK.” This is NOT the message we want to give to our students.
From today’s online issue of the Chronicle of Higher Ed
The Future of Plagiarism
By EMRYS WESTACOTT
FIRST PERSON
Academics share their personal experiences
It is the year 2030. Zack, a professor of business, and Chelsea, a professor of psychology, are drinking coffee in the faculty lounge of a distinguished New England university.
Zack: Jeez! Can you believe it? Three students in my electoral-marketing class turned in exactly the same paper. I mean, like, exactly the same! Like, even the slightly off footnotes — you know, the kind that make it look as if they’re attributing sources but which can’t be tracked down — even they were the same.
Chelsea: That sucks — that really sucks. I bet I know how it happened, though. I bet they were all running the same plagiarizing software. There’s loads of applications out there now. There’s Copycat, Lastminute, Feetup, ProfScam, Majorist …. They must have used a cheap one, though, if the papers were identical. The better ones introduce random variations in, like, vocab, grammar, quotations — all that stuff.
Zack: You mean they, like, buy a paper off the Internet and then run it through a program to make enough changes so the plagiarism can’t be detected?
Chelsea: Nah, that’d be too much like hard work. All they do is sit on their fat butts and input the paper topic they’ve been assigned. The software does the search for them and gives them a list of papers they can download that fit the bill. Remember BizRate and Epinions? It’s basically like that. You can have the results sorted according to relevance, length, grade, price, risk, and so on. Like I said, the better programs have a tinker function that lowers the risk of getting caught.
Zack: Man, that’s, like, so not the way to do things! I mean, like, I want to say to these kids: “Hellooooo! Can you please tell me again why you’re paying $2-million yuan a semester to go to a top American university so you can have a computer program find your papers for you?”
Chelsea: It’s changing times, Zack, changing times. These kids’ll just tell you that’s the way it’s done now. Live with it or get back to your parchment and typewriter.
Zack: Sorry, dude, but I’m not there yet. I mean, I don’t want to sound like some old guy remembering how hard he had it during the war, but when I was an undergrad, I did my own Web search for everything I plagiarized — you name it: short essays, term papers, lab reports, test questions we knew the prof was downloading, answer codes to multiple-choice exams, maps, diagrams, the works. We didn’t have smartass software telling us what to turn in. It was a hard slog. Took hours sometimes.
Chelsea: Tell me about it! I once pulled an all-nighter cobbling together a term paper on Moby-Dick. I used, like, half a dozen different sources, and I had to find every one of them myself. Did my own cut and paste, my own vocab tinkering, made up my own title — everything.
Zack: And the way we did it — it took, like, real skill. You really had to know your stuff or you’d get caught out by those policing programs they used to have. What was that one called?
Chelsea: Omigod! You mean, like, Turnitin.com?
Zack: That’s right, Turnitin.com. Wow, that was crazy the way the profs used to trust stuff like that.
Chelsea: Well, it used to catch some people out.
Zack: They deserved it, man. Anyone who’d done, like, programming 101 could get around those detectors. Me and my roommate once wrote an app that we were hoping might take off — we called it Turnitoff. It was cool. You ran your paper through Turnitoff and it would insert invisible jammers to make Turnitin jump to the next sentence whenever it came across a plagiarized passage.
Chelsea: That’s so awesome! Did you make anything from it?
Zack: Nah, someone hacked in, copied it, improved it, and put it out there before we’d got it into shape. But you get my point. Back then, plagiarism took some knowledge and some know-how. If you didn’t know what you were doing, you’d be toast on the provost’s carpet in no time.
Chelsea: Right. Of course back then it was still treated like some sort of crime. So if you went the plagiarism track you were putting your ass on the line.
Zack: That’s my point. In our day, there was really something at stake. Your plagiarist then was a sort of data-artist. But now … I mean, like, where’s the skill in inputting the topic and choosing which product to turn in? It’s about as pedagogically challenging as buying a pair of socks.
Chelsea: What really worries me is how these kids are going to manage when they’re, like, through with college and out in the workplace. OK, you can run some software to get you a paper on the Second Great Depression or the Iraqi Civil War. But that’s just academic crap that no one wants but us professors. Those programs aren’t any good for creating real-world outputs like business assessments, legal briefs, data tables, and the like.
Zack: Absolutely. For that real-world stuff, you gotta do plagiarism the old-fashioned way — you know, with, like, elbow grease and a real understanding of the tools available.
Chelsea: And judgment. Don’t forget judgment. I don’t care how much we used to take from others, we, like, still had to exercise informed judgment at the end of the process. Is this paper relevant to the assigned topic? Is the prof really likely to use the same multiple-choice test three years in a row? Is that conclusion with the Whitman quotation a dead giveaway? That’s the human element, and there’s no substitute for it.
Zack: Dude, you are so right. And it’s that human element in the whole process that, like, makes it meaningful, something worth doing. And at the end of it, you’ve got something you can be proud of. For me, that’s what college is all about.
Chelsea: So what are you going to do about those three students?
Zack: I guess I’ll just follow standard procedure and give ‘em all B’s. But I’m telling you, it sticks in my craw. Man, they’ve just done so little for that B.
Chelsea: Still, a B’s no joke. They’re going to feel kind of bad at graduation, with their parents watching and everything, and they’re, like, the only ones not graduating summa cum laude.
Zack: I guess you’re right. And at least they’ll still graduate.
Emrys Westacott is a professor of humanities and philosophy at Alfred University.
I was going to start by saying that responding to a blog often leaves me feeling late and behind the times, BUT since I last saw the Provost’s posting about mashups in late April there’s been plenty of vistors and postings so what follows may extend the conversation.
I have two points to add:
1) Ali is correct in pointing out that mashups are not scholarship; they are a form of expressive culture that, whether read as an experimental mode or not, don’t ask for or require the kind of attention to citation that a scholarly work would.
2) The idea that the the mashup is “new” is nether accurate nor does it provide an excuse for blurring lines of source attribution or expressive form.
In the 1960s William S. Burroughs began experimenting with the cut-up form by fusing texts to produce new texts. There are Dada roots to this. UBU.com has a great archive of Burroughs cut ups, both spoken word and film. (I’ve left a link for a film version below:)
http://www.ubu.com/film/burroughs_ghosts.html
If the Provost is stil interested in this issue: I’d ask him to consider the different audience/ producer conventions & expectations employed are employed in the production of various texts, particularly when were working across mediums and expressive modes (video to written work; Youtube to an academic paper).
There’s also the interesting question of the mashup and the cutups relation to production eras. Check out Burrough’s film and you’ll see
some version of Modernity; check out the mashup above and you’ll see a rendering of postmodernity.