Attribution in the wired world
Below is the cover of a magazine I bought a few years ago in Changsha, Hunan. It’s a good example of malicious translation (the Chinese title means something like “Weekend Literature Collection” or more colloquially, “Readers Digest”, although that name might be taken).
I use that image in a slide in courses where I talk to students about plagiarism. I’ve recently discovered that it’s easy to use Google to search for someone else’s Powerpoint slides on a given topic, by including “ppt” with a set of search terms. But I haven’t figured out a simple or consistent way to attribute the help I get that way, which is something that could lead to trouble some day.
Cutting and pasting and the informal posting of material online has led to some new issues with plagiarism. A colleague was recently accused of “self-plagiarism” by a reviewer, which seemed particularly absurd given that related to the methods section of an article (which basically functions as a recipe to enable someone else to replicate what you’ve done, and hence has limited scope for creativity). In the evanescent world of the web, finding a way back to document sources of material, particularly for something as informal as a talk or class, is not completely straightforward, but it’s something I need to figure out how to do.