A New Direction (Hopefully)

Over the past few months, I have pondered whether or not to cede this forum to wherever it is all the abandoned internet observations go to die. However, I still have a readership of a few dedicated friends and colleagues and I do not want this forum, and the specific connections it engenders, to go away and therefore be of no use to me or anyone else. At the same time, a resounding emptiness has settled over the intellectual part of my brain as I have finished my thesis and all that remain are the formatting changes the graduate college will invariably cast upon me whether I followed their style guide to the letter or not. However, such a project leaves many future avenues for investigation, hopefully by me as I further my academic career, so I have decided to use this space to write, in short pieces, about the questions I hope to answer.

My thesis dealt with the influence of the digital on print, specifically how such influence affects composition and narrative in contemporary novels like House of Leaves and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that contain a variety of visual media. Meanwhile, I have become a fan of the films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, in which narratives are related in a nonsequential and often disjointed manner, especially in 21 Grams. Rudimentary research revealed to me the existence of a genre of film called hyperlink cinema, of which Inarritu's films are primary examples. As I already am interested in what Jay David Bolter has called the 'remediation' of the digital into other media, such a term suggests that hyperlinks, which are a component of hypertexts, are being remediated into film and influencing their narratives. I am skeptical of a straightforward interpretation such as this, but it bears investigation, and I will hopefully be conducting it here with the intention of presenting a paper at the 2010 PCA/ACA Conference in St. Louis this March.

With my primary research interests centering around the graphic construction of narrative, it should surprise no one that I have a scholarly interest in comic books. In yet another attempt to develop a conference paper for the University of Florida's ImageNext (which I hope to attend assuming I can get a travel grant), I want to investigate the use of the nine-panel (or even six-panel) page in contemporary comics, especially as it is used to as individual panels and a larger cohesive picture at the same time. This is much less grounded in theory at this stage, and much more supported by my singular amazement at one particular page in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. But as proposals are due at the end of the year, I should hopefully stumble upon something before too long.

Several colleagues have expressed surprise at my willingness to put all my scholarly ideas in a public forum before I take steps to insure they are published (thereby giving me all the credit). I find that a bit of an antiquated view, and think the benefits of outside discussion greatly outweighs the slim chance that my work will be hijacked or plagiarized. In addition, writing is a lonely business, and working out ideas here will allow me to keep plodding towards my ultimate goal of working full time as an academic, hopefully helping me deal with the fact that I have to work more and more in my service industry job just to make ends meet. Help keep the eyes on the prize, so to speak.

Please, let me know what you think about this decision, and more than that, feedback will do nothing but help me as I implement these plans. Many of you are academics, or at least academically inclined, and I suspect that you have an idea or two about such topics already. In fact, I would be open to using this space with other authors who are attempting to jumpstart their own research in a similar fashion, assuming of course that the content was relatively the same.

The Plagiarism Allegations Against Chris Anderson

Though you might have trouble finding it now that the round the clock coverage of dead celebrities has flooded all media of any kind, earlier this week Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review discovered several instances of plagiarism in Chris Anderson’s new book, Free. I’ve been looking forward to this book for a few months now, having read The Long Tail back in February.

I’m not all that interested in going back over something others have done better, but I do want to briefly note something. Anderson and other Web 2.0 figures vociferously defend the right of creators to mash-up other works and create new things out of them. When remixing video/audio, it isn’t often that one is really accused of plagiarism; no one is trying to pass off the actual rapping of Dr. Dre as their own. Yet when writing, such a mash-up doesn’t signify the input of others in the same way, something I struggled with in May when I tried to do something by barely rewriting a couple of dozen articles about the Kindle into several sustained arguments. I included links as a sort of citation, but only because I was so uncomfortable with the process.

Anderson’s book is not a scholarly work, but that doesn’t mean he should be excused from citing his material appropriately. That said, I think the argument could be made that he was ‘sampling’ the work of others and integrating it into a larger whole that makes a different, or perhaps just broader, point. Maybe I can put it better another way.

Imagine this: rather than printed text, let’s say that Anderson is making a video. He uses the same pieces he is accused of plagiarizing in his video, but instead of taking them from other printed texts, he instead uses clips of the authors giving a speech where they say the same things. Why is this not plagiarism too? Does the fact that someone other than Anderson would be on video enough of a citation?

In fact, plagiarism is a broad term. For instance, were I to do something in one of my graduate classes like Anderson has done here, it would be considered plagiarism. As would me downloading an essay off the web and turning it in as my own work. But the latter is outright fraud, while the former could be characterized as merely careless. Inadvertent plagiarism shouldn’t be excused, but it likewise shouldn’t be considered the same crime as deliberate copying. Even scholarly, uncited copying was rampant for years and years until the attitude toward citation became a norm.

This is an unfortunate situation, and to his credit, Anderson has owned up to his error and been quite apologetic. Yet I worry that with all this negative coverage, people will be put off of what could be a book full of good points. The mere fact that Anderson didn’t use quotation marks when he should have does not render his argument null and void. He was wrong, but it might not be as bad as it’s being made out to be.