Dap Louw wrote: > I've just returned from a workshop on Plagiarism where the presenter was > adamant that if you use any part of what you've previously published without > referencing it, it's plagiarism. I agree that this could be the case if the > person goes overboard. However, according to the presenter this also > includes single sentences, phrases and examples. I find this too rigid.
I wonder if that speaker had ever before said in public any of the things s/he said at that conference. The world is full of people who desperately want there to be immutable, inviolable, utterly explicit rules for conduct. Unfortunately, the only way to make rules like that is to make them extremely restrictive. Such people think that wrong rules that are transparently clear are better than right rules that might be open to interpretation. It's a little like looking for your lost keys under the streetlamp (rather than where you lost them) because the light is better. They spend their time correcting your use of commas (where there was little chance of misinterpretation) and wondering whether you have ever before strung the same five words together in the same order. In their effort to be utterly consistent, they will get themselves into Barber Paradoxes of these kinds. (viz., Plagiarism is, at core, presenting the ideas of another as your own. But what if the "other" is, in fact, yourself at another time? Wouldn't that count as a kind of plagiarism as well? And around they go.) The real question is whether you are presenting an old idea as though it were completely original. Is this audience led to believe that it is the first ever to hear the idea that you are about to express? My experience is that few conference-goers actually have such high expectations of every talk they attend. On the other hand, they will be justifiably disappointed if they hear you give essentially the same talk they heard you give last year, or at another conference with a large overlap in membership. The solution is not to come up with a watertight definition of "plagiarism." It is, instead, to meet your obligations to your audience. (Consider, would you rather hear an interesting new idea that was first presented just a week ago across the continent and a conference for a different discipline that you never would have attended anyway, or would you prefer not hearing about that interesting new idea precisely because it was first presented then, there, to them?) To my mind, a powerpoint slide at the beginning or end of the presentation saying that "some of this material has been previously presented at..." should hold be enough to hold the mavens at bay. They are best ignored. There are too many more important things to do. Of course, you run the risk that they will ultimately get into positions of power and try to clobber you over the head. (But most aspects of life run the risk that silly and crazy people will get into power and do that...) Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
