Posted on No Comments on to catch a plagiarist

to catch a plagiarist

Every semester I get a few folks who try to sneak some plagiarism by me. Three this term. There are the usual tactics for fending off plagiarism. Creating assignments that are difficult to cheat on, for one. I have been using Wikis for assignments, and there is a nice program that scans the internet for any material that was used to create a single page (Copyscape), which was helpful. Some colleges have TurnItIn , (or CheckForPlagiarism, EVE2 Plagiarism Detection System, iThenticate, LexisNexis CopyGuard, or EssayFraud) but others do not. So, there are a few things folks can look out for. (With at least one caveat: These aren’t guaranteed, just clues to help find evidence.) A few easy clues are: a.) mysteriously changing fonts, or font sizes, b.) radical changes in voice, c.) the out-of-place fancy word or use of a semi-colon, d.) no source material provided, and e.) going very vague when the assignment doesn’t require it (e.g., “Karl Marx was born in…”). A friend became suspicious of a student who had a reference in Russian. Heck, I had a student–a while ago–who turned in a paper that still had the website address in the top righthand side of the paper. (Again, just clues.)

Primes vs. Quotation Marks

But the one that really catches students (and I am really only sharing this because so many colleagues appreciate it when I tell them), is this: Finding ‘Straight’ and ‘Curved’ quotation marks mixed together in the same paper. You see, a word processing program like Microsoft Word knows when you are starting a quote and will automatically curve a quote when you hit the space bar after a word that is preceded by said quotation mark. But when a piece of text is cut-and-pasted out of an internet source (e.g., this blog), Word does not recognize the quotations (which are often ‘straight’ or ‘prime symbols’) and leaves them straight. (Try it.) So, a quote–and most critically, the material around that quote–have been lifted from elsewhere. Plug a chunk of material from around those straight quotes into Google and voila! (Ok, one more caveat: Yes, we all take things from multiple sources and it’s not a guaranteed case of plagiarism. And yes, a quote is by definition a cited piece of text, but I’m saying that one should focus on the material around the quote.)

A great tip from my friend Andy: “If the entire paper is [suspiciously] well-written, check the electronic document properties. It could include references to the paper mill from which they purchased the paper.” Nice!

Other hints? Feel free to pass them along. For more on Internet Plagiarism, see Plagiarized.com.

Update #1:New York Times article on Plagiarism.

Update #2: The Awl has some tips for cheaters. Know Your Enemy!

Posted on No Comments on perec and writing

perec and writing

 

Georges Perec
Georges Perec, 1936-1982 (I mean, come on. Look at that face.)

Fitting that, moments after running into my favorite writing teacher, sociologist Jim Jasper (see his comments on how to write better here and how to give better talks here), I came across a little blog post on a ‘definitive’ reissue of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which has been out of print for a bit. I have commented on the book (and Calvino’s) earlier, but I was inspired to learn more about the Oulipo group, which sought to promote new forms of writing. As Joshua Cohen, in the blog Tablet, explains:

Those constraints include, but are not limited to: Anagram; Palindrome; Word Limits; Vowel Limits; Word Replacement (in which every occurrence of a noun is replaced by another noun; for example, if noun = umbrella, then that fragment should read “in which every occurrence of an umbrella is replaced by another umbrella”); Vowel Replacement (in which the word ‘noun’ might be turned to ‘noon,’ the hour, or ‘naan,’ the Middle Asian flatbread, or to ‘neon,’); the Snowball (a poem’s verse or sentence in which each word is exactly one letter longer than the preceding word); and the Lipogram, from the Greek lipagrammatos (“missing symbol”), in which a text is generated that excludes one or more letters.

 

 

Posted on 6 Comments on blogender

blogender

A website, Genderanalyzer, attempts to guess the gender of a blog based on the writing. Its data is trained by UClassify. I figured that it would be interesting to look at a dozen sociology bloggers, half male, half female. The results: Ts’i mahnu uterna (Correct), Kieran Healy (Correct), Kristina B (Wrong), What is the What? (Wrong), Eszter Hargittai (Wrong), Shakha‘s posts on Scatterplot (Wrong), Jeremy‘s posts on Scatterplot (Correct), Tina‘s posts on Scatterplot (Wrong), GradMommy (Wrong), Rachel’s Tavern (Wrong), Chris Uggen (Correct), and Peter Levin (Correct). Now, there appears to be a great deal wrong with this little program, since when I took it, its reported success rate was barely over 50%. But I also thought about what this says about reifying gender… and scholaristic writing in academia. Based on just these few trials within this social field, we see that it was incorrect 100% of the time with the female bloggers, and 16% incorrect for the male bloggers.

Posted on No Comments on while thinking about representation in ethnography…

while thinking about representation in ethnography…

…I often think of Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Manohla Dargis, in viewing Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, is reminded of Borges’ On Exactitude of Science. Here:

…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

From Travels of Praiseworthy Men ( 1658 ) by J. A. Suarez Miranda

Borges, J.L. 1999. Collected Fictions. Trans. A.H. Hurley. New York: Penguin.