The Mechanic & the Muse

Plagiarizing imagery

Say the word "plagiarism" and names like disgraced New York Times reporter
Jayson Blair, and chick-lit author  Kaavya Viswanatha come to mind.

It's unlikely  the names Horst and Daniel Zielske ring a similar bell.

But according to an eye-opening slideshow by David Segal that's this morning's centerpiece on Slate.com, the Zeiskes have also been accused of purloining the work of another. I

n this case, the theft includes not words but images, and the victim is not a writer but a visual artist.

"Can Photographers Be Plagiarists?" is also an excellent example of the way that text and images married in a slideshow can be a powerful story, produced outside the traditional box of story and photos displayed in discrete fashion, detached from each other.

Opal's Unoriginal Sin

Thanks to Google News, I learn that Harvard not only has a daily student paper, The Crimson, but an alternative weekly as well, the Harvard Independent, which has also weighed in on the crash and perhaps soon-to-burn literary career of first time novelist Kaavya Viswanathan, who

• inadvertently/unconsciously/

• cribbed/lifted/stole/

the words of another writer.
Did Opal Author Plagiarize — or Was It Her Handlers?
Viswanathan’s Mild Mea Culpa Leaves Questions Unanswered

Shane Wilson, who wrote the the first piece, detected in the blogosphere more than a whiff of schadenfreude:

"A Harvard student had been found in a compromising position, and less than 24 hours later, a frisson of sadistic glee was creeping up the Internet's electronic backbone."

It's not glee I feel, but dismay. As someone who has written extensively about the twin perils of writing, plagiarism and fabrication, I also detect complicity in these crimes on the part of teachers and editors who fail in their duty to educate student and professional writers about these pitfalls and more important, ways to avoid them. Who knows, perhaps Kaavya Viswanathan is guilty of nothing more than confusing a novel with a term paper, or merely turned in to her editors at Little, Brown a lousy job of paraphrasing, which as Judy Hunter, a teacher at Grinnell College in Iowa, has conceded "is a difficult art." Hunter points out:

"In a bad paraphrase, you merely substitute words, borrowing the sentence structure or the organization directly from the source. In a good paraphrase you offer your reader a wholesale revision, a new way of seeing the text you are paraphrasing. You summarize, you reconstruct, you tell your reader about what the source has said, but you do so entirely in your own words, your own voice, your own sentence structure, your own organization." (my emphasis added)

That methodology must reside within the DNA of honest writer. (To be honest, I admit I plagiarized Hunter's quote, from my textbook and one of my columns below, committing, in effect, an act of self-plagiarism.)

Plagiarism is usually an act of desperation. But it can be forestalled, I believe, by focusing more attention on the honest ways writers learn and are influenced by other writers without stealing their work.

Transparency is one of the chief methods for avoiding plagiarism so that a writer can avoid the painful fate of Kaavya Viswanathan. Are you willing to acknowledge the influence of another writer? Imagine this young writer supplying an author's note for her novel that disclosed

"Some of the words, phrases, sentences and even paragraphs in this book have been taken from the writing of Megan F. McCafferty."

Of course, she couldn't because no editor or publisher of fiction would tolerate this "unoriginal sin," the title of a seminal article on journalistic plagiarism.

Here are some resources for reaching that goal:

Getting to the Source: Preventing Plagiarism
The First Peril: Fabrication
Netting Plagiarists
Plagiarism in the Information Age

Um, I was unconscious when I plagiarized

The Washington Post adds a new excuse to the litany of plagiarists caught in the act.

Kaavya Viswanathan admitted yesterday she "borrowed" from two novels, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings" by Megan F. McCafferty, to produce her first novel, about the daughter of Indian parents growing up in suburban New Jersey, the first in a two book half-million book deal.

In today's Harvard Crimson, which broke the story exposing the Harvard sophomore and first time novelist's blatant word theft, the author contributes yet another pathetically improbable rationalization for wordnapping: in a statement, Viswanathan says she "wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized the words" of the novelist she blatantly ripped off. 

Oops, says young author. (Here are two profiles, one from the Boston Globe, the other from the New York Times, before the literary shit hit the fan.) I'll just rewrite to get rid of those pesky word-thefts of mine. Why not? After all, her publisher at Little, Brown, describes her as a "incredibly hard-working writer and student." Not hard-working enough to write her own stuff apparently, but hey, she's just a kid at Harvard. I mean, give her a break.

And just to show how hard work is rewarded. "Sloppy Firsts" today ranks 1,437 on Amazon.com, while Mcafferty's "Second Helpings" ranks 3,399. Kaavya Viswanathan's McCafferty-dependent novel: 169.

Most intriguing, towards the bottom of today's Crimson coverage, is the role of a relatively new player in the synergistic (can you say "incestuous"?) world of  entertainment.

"Viswanathan worked with a book packaging company—17th Street Productions, which is owned by Alloy Entertainment—in the development of "Opal Mehta." Alloy, which shares the novel’s copyright with Viswanathan, is slated to produce the movie adaptation along with Contrafilm. DreamWorks has bought the rights to the film version of "Opal Mehta." "As has been previously reported, we helped Kaavya conceptualize and plot the book," Leslie Morgenstein, the president of Alloy Entertainment, wrote in an e-mail yesterday. "We are looking into the serious allegations detailed in the Crimson before commenting further."

I've got another book packaging idea for  "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." Grind it into pulp and dump it in the trash.

Why old farts should get huge advances

Okay, so if I'd known, before today, that a high-school kid got a half-million advance for a two-book deal, I'd be green with envy.

But when I see today that this young writer has so clearly lifted from another novelist's book on the same topic, it occurs to me that publishers are out of their minds!

Of course,it won't matter: Kaavya Viswanathan Harvard ’08 has already got her Dreamworks movie deal and they could give a shit whether she plagiarized or not. They can just buy the other novelist off.

My favorite part of the Harvard Crimson's story is this quote:

"Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies Werner Sollors, after reviewing a list of 24 similar passages found in “Opal Mehta” and “Sloppy Firsts,” wrote in an e-mail yesterday: “Judging by the excerpts you have assembled, and three department stores and 169 specialty shops later, it looks as though some strong version of anxiety of influence could clearly be detected in ‘How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,’ all the more so because of those miniscule variations that change ‘Human Evolution’ to ‘Psych’ in the hope of making the result less easily googleable.”

Publishing's Pendulum Swing

Be on the lookout for a sharp contrast between Random House's defensive response to initial reports that James Frey's best-selling "A Million Little Pieces" was built on a fabricated house of cards way Simon & Shuster reacts to the possibility of a purloined book proposal. The heads-up, as so often happens, came from my colleague, the increasingly famous and reliable Jim Romenesko who caught my interest with a report from Women's Wear Daily about a book proposal based, allegedly, on quotes lifted from other writers.

The writer, Emily Davies, a former fashionista for the Times of London, fessed up to WWD about sticky fingers as she shopped a proposal for a memoir, “How to Wear Black: Adventures on Fashion’s Front Line,” that reportedly won her a $900,000 advance. As plagiarists go, her excuse reaches a new level of self-delusion.

"Davies...responded to WWD’s questions with a statement defending her actions in the proposal. Saying it was “not intended for public consumption,” Davies claimed, in effect, that it was easier for her to give prospective publishers the flavor of her memoir by appropriating other writers’ words than by relying on her own memories. “The first thing I did when I began putting together my proposal…was to dig out a mass of notes, cuttings and stories I had assembled over the years.…Although I used these notes in the proposal, there would be no question of my using any unoriginal material in my finished book.”

But WWD's Jeff Bercovici quotes an unnamed " agent in the memoir market (who) said it was by no means standard practice for memoirists to borrow the work of other writers, uncredited, in their proposals. The agent predicted that Simon & Schuster, having watched Random House take a drubbing in the press for publishing Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” would drop the book: “People are just so on-edge about this kind of stuff now.”

They don't have to be. There are scrupulously honest memoirists out there who make it clear that there are ethical ways to summon the past in print. They're the kind of memoirists that publishers need to hold up as examples to writers, editors and agents. It would be one way to swing the pendulum away from scandal.

Netting plagiarists--A response

Terry Schwadron, an old friend from our days at the Providence Journal, who now is Editor, Information & Technology at The New York Times, thinks I got some things wrong in my post about plagiarism detection software. He writes:

Chip,

"I think you're wrong about the chilling effects of anti-plagiarism.

"I think you're right about the beginning stages of a new software program aimed at doing something about plagiarism.

"You're starting with the writer.

"I'll start with the institution for which the writer is producing work. Or even better, the reader. The writer's work is being offered as original under journalistic ethics that underscore that it has not been plagiarized to a reader whose sole criterion may be whether to believe in the credibility of a story. Without credibility, we have nothing.

Too often, particularly in the last couple of years, writers have indeed plagiarized.

"How do these incidents come to light? Almost always from a reader.

"The finding then goes to some editor who looks through like stories in a laborious way and usually comes up with mixed findings. Then there is a separate process to figure out what happens next.

"The idea behind electronic review of documents -- whether news stories, academic papers or any other documents -- was simply one to save time and effort, not to replace human judgment. When your World program underlines a misspelled term, it is regarded as a help, not a chill-producer.

"The idea of using electronic review to detect plagiarism is replete with problems. Here are a few:

"- What's the pool of comparative stories? Over what time period? Against everything on the web?

"- What is the level of acceptable reliance on a phrase or quote. If we run all sports stories, shouldn't we find the same material from the Olympics in several stories? Does that mean that they cheated?

"- What's the process for internal review?

"- When do you run plagiarism software?

There are lots of questions. But the use of a piece of software should be like the use of the telephone -- once you know how to use it, you can call Mom or the President of the United States. Unless you know how to use it, you can't call anyone."

Terry

Thanks, Terry,

I value your response. It brings the perspective of an editor to the laborious process of plagiarism detecting software, and, as someone whose copy has undergone your keen scrutiny, I know the discussion is better for it.

Netting plagiarists

The roots of the word plagiarism lie in the Latin noun "plaga" used to describe a net employed by kidnappers to steal children.

Today plagiarists use an electronic version of a plaga, netting others prose with the cut and paste functions on their word processors.

But now those trying to snare wordnappers in the newsroom, classroom and the scholarly academy are equipped with an electronic net of their own.

Battleships rely on shakedown cruises, inaugural voyages designed to uncover mechanical and other problems that only come to light when the ship is at seaa. Programmers do the same, releasing beta versions of software intended to root out bugs and glitches, and often engaging users to help them in the search.

Check out "Plagiarism 2.0," by Gadi Dechter in The Baltimore City Paper to learn about illuminating shakedown cruises of Lexis-Nexis CopyGuard to detect plagiarism, in this case commited by ousted columnist Michael Olesker, and then by the City Paper.

Journalists normally recoil at any assault on their First Amendment rights, fearing a "chilling effect" that may hinder their work to inform the citizenry.

But CopyGuard may produce a similar effect, given its ability to to compare allegedly purloined prose with, as Dechter describes it, "more than 6.1 billion documents in LexisNexis and web databases, and then identifies any matching phrases and their respective sources."

Anything that might slow a writer's decision to plagiarize or to be less careful about habits that make it happen is one may be chilling effect that is a positive development for writers, like Olesker and other plagiarists, whose fact fate is often the corporate equivalent of the death penalty.

There may be another chilling effect: LexisNexis won't say how much it costs, which I assume means it's pricey and may be out of reach for budget-stretched newsrooms.

Wordnapping

If you're interested in plagiarism, or hoping to avoid stealing another writer's words, check out a new resource, plagiary.org. It's a peer-reviewed academic journal that promises "Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication and Falsification."

Clearly designed for scholars and teachers, it's too early to tell how useful it will be to writers, but a New York Times article about the project suggests it may help us understand explain why so many writers in recent years have paid the ultimate penalty -- losing their job -- because they lifted someone else's work or, or in James Frey's infamous case, simply made up things. In it, Sara Ivry quotes the journal's founder, John P. Lesko, a professor of applied linguistics at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan:

"Mr. Lesko has spent the last decade examining how and why students appropriate other people's work. "There's the old formula for crime — a combination of motivation and opportunity," he said, citing the ease of pointing and clicking on Web sites. "We've put youngsters into such a rip and burn frenzy, downloading music, it's as if everything is free."

But plagiarism isn't just for kids who cut and paste term papers who blame deadline pressure; those mea culpas echo in newsrooms, too. An expert on academic integrity, Duke University's Timothy Dodd, told the Times:

"We are creating this kind of winning culture that is causing a lot of people to take shortcuts, to overinvest in the chase for stardom," Mr. Dodd said. "It's a corruption of the kind of marketing culture of 'if I can get it to sell, then I have done well.' And, if you have to sell something that is a bit fraudulent, that is deceptive, that's still in service to the greater good, which is 'I've marketed something.' "

Plagiarism is so easy to commit and the penalty so dire. There's pathology at work, to be sure.

But much of it happens, I'm convinced, because not enough is done in the classroom, newsroom or writing class to help writers avoid the crime of wordnapping. I'm heartened that plagiary.org wants to devote its scholarship not only to out plagiarists and make-up artists. "Plagiarism/fraud detection and prevention" is on its list of subjects the journal seeks to explore in research articles and reports.

Topics I'm also eager to see addressed are effective ways to teach the art of paraphrasing and plagiarism detection software that aids literary crime fighters, but also furnishes easy-to-use tools that writers can use, like spell check, to help them identify perilous passages that could cost them their jobs and their reputation.

Plagiarism, fabrication and falsification are a blight on journalistic, literary and academic landscapes. Let's hope plagiary.org can help writers clean up their act.