Posts by Jolisa
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Worse, lifts her writing from here and makes it seem like quotes from a conversation - "Gracewood said". In a story about plagiarism.
That's a jolly good point, Sacha. A paper I write for over here has a strict policy about that: it's "Smith says/said" if you talked to Smith (in person or over the phone, which must also be noted) and "Smith writes/wrote" if you just plucked Smith's writings from her blog. Uh, I mean if you are quoting a book or other written communication, the form of which must also be signalled.
Not so in NZ? Or should I press for a correction to the story?
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Thanks for articulating that, Sacha. It did strike me as odd that they interviewed their keyboard, rather than me. Or me, but via the keyboard like that. Luckily I made their job easier by blogging so articulately and so promptly!
Also, how peculiar to write that entire article without actually naming Public Address. Especially when other parties' affiliation is noted (Auckland University, Penguin, The Listener).
And I don't usually insist on it (not wanting to be seen as a total banker) but the occasional Dr. Gracewood would be nice. I'm only a doctor of literature, but in this case -- which is, funnily enough, precisely about the philosophy of doctoring literature -- it seems vaguely relevant.
</habitual self-deprecation>
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Here you go, Matthew: Witi Ihimaera on the rationale for rewriting.
I actually think it's quite a cool thing to do - plays sometimes appear in several different published versions (not just Shakespeare but current stuff), and poets are known to rework their greatest hits now and then. Some writers, too, revisit the same material from different angles across a lifetime, deriving different nuances and conclusions (Alice Munro gets away with this beautifully and there must be others I'm not thinking of right now). Tobias Wolff revises his short stories every time he anthologises them, as do other writers. And I think many of the great serialisers of the 19th C took advantage of publication in book form to tidy up odd loose ends and tighten their prose.
I do agree that there is something powerful and inviolate about the work "as originally published." It's kind of a fetish, eh? But as long as the previous versions stay available, I think revisiting and rewriting is a perfectly valid artistic strategy. Especially, perhaps, in this age of multiple versions and constant updating.
Plus, imagine the number of dissertations one could write about it all!
And yes, in this case, I imagine (and hope) that the official rewriting of The Trowenna Sea occurs sooner rather than later.
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Joe, that's astonishing about Turnitin being used as default grading labour!! Cheaper than paying grad students to do it, I guess, although how exactly does it mark the essays, other than "dodgy" or "not dodgy"?
The people who make Turnitin also offer a "personal" version called WriteCheck. As an experiment, I fed WriteCheck a document containing the unattributed material I'd found in the novel. It detected and matched only one passage.
My guess is that Turnitin is primarily optimized to detect wholesale copying of entire essays, not the sort of work that borrows a sentence here or a paragraph there.
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it would seem that he's not particularly tech-savvy.
The same thought did occur to me, especially since the first two responses when you google "Hohepa Te Umuroa" (the real historical figure the novel is based on) are:
1) the Dictionary of NZ Biography page on Te Umuroa, and
2) the Google Books entry for Karen Sinclair's book Maori Times, Maori Places: Prophetic Histories (published in NZ as Prophetic Histories: People of the Maramatanga).It was the latter that contained the familiar passages that caught my eye; the echoes appear in the novel's epilogue, which was apparently written late or even last in the process. Any inquisitive reader could, and probably would, have found the same. I just happened to do it first.
My subsequent searches were not exhaustive (merely exhausting!), and only dealt with what could be easily found via Google and in the nearest library at hand. Fortunately it's a very well-stocked one.
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This was a seminar class in which we were due to discuss that very paper. I offered to keep things under wraps by deferring the workshop without explaining why (these things tend to be dealt with very discreetly, and are kept in a closed file unless there are subsequent offenses)
Quick note of clarification, since I missed the edit window: The appropriate proceedings had already been initiated behind the scenes, but need not have been made public to the rest of the class. It was the student's choice to do so, even though I offered the face-saving option of simply deferring the discussion of the essay.
Given that it was a workshop-based class, the rest of the class had already spent time preparing suggested improvements for the paper in question and were definitely owed some sort of explanation. Still, it was a brave and upright thing for the student to do. The class was both horrified and impressed - also depressed, in a way, as the plagiarism was a betrayal of the trust we had generated in sharing our writing with each other. It definitely cast a pall over the general group vibe for some time after.
Still, as I say, it led to a sobering and useful discussion.
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Is it too time-consuming to take plagiarism seriously?
Perhaps; also, bad for business, as noted upthread. And I think Emma's original comment points to something interesting too - there's a strange contagious shame about it.
As my partner discovered when had explained why he'd had to rush home to wrangle the boys while I talked to the radio people, saying the P word out loud in a room full of academics is a bit like blurting out "herpes" in a singles bar. A shudder runs through the room.
That said, it's taken extremely seriously over here.
Students who are caught will often try the "it was inadvertent" excuse - frequently accompanied by tears of self-pity - but no one should ever accept it.
To his credit, the one student I caught "bang to rights" was totally upfront about it. This was a seminar class in which we were due to discuss that very paper. I offered to keep things under wraps by deferring the workshop without explaining why (these things tend to be dealt with very discreetly, and are kept in a closed file unless there are subsequent offenses) but the student, to their enormous credit, fronted up and apologised to the entire class, which led to some really interesting and productive discussions.
Definitely a teachable moment.
Also, if I recall correctly, it wasn't much later that first-time author and Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan was being exposed for her literary plagiarism (her book was pulped, and her reputation was not exactly unharmed), so the issue was definitely on students' minds as a serious issue with material consequences.
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Definitely a teachable moment, eh Paul. There have been some very interesting conversations around our dinner table lately, hence my line in the review about how a primary schooler will give you an unequivocal answer on the question of how much borrowing is forgivable. A lot less than 0.4% (and that figure only applies to what was within reach of Google and my local resources in the busy days before the deadline for the article).
I keep thinking of this line from the Auckland University plagiarism policy:
Submitting someone else’s unattributed or less than fully attributed work or ideas is not evidence of your own grasp of the material and cannot earn you marks.
Presumably this refers to student essays, but it applies in the literary context as well. For example, if you're telling me a story in the voice of a young Maori man who serendipitously finds himself at Waitangi in February 1840, I don't want to read what William Colenso saw as he looked upon the crowd at Waitangi, even if it is out of copyright.
I want to know how that day might have looked to Hohepa Te Umuroa from the Whanganui. Would he have bothered to notice the striped dogskin cloaks, the colours of the woollen blankets? Maybe, but maybe not -- and if he had, mightn't he have had slightly different thoughts about them? Were striped dogskins big in the lower North Island that year, or ever? Were they a sign of wealth, of mana, or of an unseasonable chill in the air? Did Hohepa crave a particular colour of blanket to take home to his sweetheart? What about shoes and uniforms - did they catch his eye, too? What else might he have spotted that the missionary wouldn't?
In other words, there are ethical reasons not to borrow other people's words, but also artistic ones. (I could write at length about the other examples, but might save that for a follow-up blog post.)
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Thanks, Russell. We did our best to put the fun into funeral, as instructed by the man himself. The only thing missing was him.
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"scrupulous and literate as well as a slashingly hot piece of arse"
I'm shitted that's a bit long for a t-shirt.
Think outside the box, Emma - it's perfect for a cover blurb for Vol 2 of NSFW.
Frankly, I'd get it tattooed around your waist, starting by coiling around the navel and then tailing off where the quote ends :-)