Dear Jeremy and Ranulph,
Two footnotes to the current thread:
1) For some of us, these issues are actuality as well as aspiration. One of my teachers used to say, "Be true to your sources and your sources will be true to you." As I see it, she meant two things by this. First, care with sources leads to better and more fruitful research. Second, care with sources creates a better scholarly and scientific community.
All of us occasionally make mistakes on citations, quotations, titles, and the like. In a recent article, for example, I got the title wrong for a published source I was critiquing! But the standards still obtain for many of us. In many fields, this is a matter of professional care. In theology or psychology, for example, care with sources is fundamental. One issue that annoys me mightily in design research publications and in engineering, for example, is the matter of what many in other fields label "indirect quotation," paraphrasing an idea that appears somewhere in a source text without giving the explicit location. In a central guide to publishing in psychology, the authors admonish us to show as much care in indirect quotes as in direct quotes because they permit readers to check and query the source rather than forcing them to trawl through hundreds of pages of text to see if the source actually says what the paraphrase claims. I enjoy reading theology simply for the rhetorical clarity and attention to detail -- great scholars often present scholarly apparatus and documentation as large as the core text. This level of care is anchored in two thousand years or more of careful text work, the core of hermeneutics and exegetics.
So I do not see this as an "aspiration." It may be an aspiration to people in some fields. For many of us, it is fundamental.
2) In many of the discourse community producing ancient, classical, and medieval texts, there were no citations for two reasons. First, most educated writers knew the key classics well. Second, there was a sense that the discourse belonged to a community rather than to individuals. This sense was so strong that in some cases, texts were attributed to the masters rather than to the actual author (or editor-author) of a document.
The new discourse emerged in the wake of the printing press and grew stronger following the Humboldt university reforms.
I find the current emphasis on citation as the antidote to plagiarism unfortunate. I prefer the "be true to your sources," approach. That makes for better scholarship -- and it reduces plagiarism as a beneficial side effect. What I used to teach my students was simple: it is silly to run the risk of plagiarism when you can gain kudos for superior scholarship by sourcing and citing carefully. As all scholars know, it is enough to bring one or two truly strong new ideas forward, and to do so, we must usually build on the work of those who precede us.
This, of course, is as true of the print world as the net world.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean
Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
--
Ranulph Glanville wrote:
Of course, honesty is an aspiration, and not an actuality. But the point of an aspiration is it's what we aspire to. We need to learn to be more honest. This is good for us as people and for the subjects we work in.
Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
The majority of the works that I teach in some of my classes (as i teach ancient and medieval political theory, machiavelli and other things sometimes) .... have no citation that was not entered after the fact. Citations and plagiarism came into being somewhat together, and for a very particular reason that had nothing to do with honesty, though today they seem to have to do with concepts of 'honor codes' and 'honesty' than their original goals of enabling research, and specifically enabling the finding of research.
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