Tag: plagiarism

Collectanea 23.25 Giants-Eggs-Amateur

/ Derek Mueller

Week of June 2, 2025

Shadows, Giants, and Shadow Giants

“They stand not on the shoulders of giants, but in the shadow of them. Many of these student writers are haunted by college regulations against plagiarism that they suspect they regularly break, since they ‘know’ that nothing they write is or can be original and that they do not acknowledge every single source” (101).

〜

“To locate plagiarism in an ethical realm is to describe it as a choice behavior; hence those who plagiarize can be punished and numbered among the rejected—consigned to dwell in the shadows of giants—for they have chosen to transgress against fundamental morals” (160). 

—Rebecca Moore Howard. (1999). Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Ablex Pub.

Say Hello to My Little Hen

Figure 1. “Say Hello to My Little Hen.”

Or, “Don’t Shoot Shoot Shoot That Thing At Me,” or “So I Says to the Security Guard, ‘For Pete’s Sake, She’s a Therapy Chicken!,'” or “Hall County (Ga.) Fair Best in Retribution for Extreme Overproduction,” or “Loaded with Oyster Shells,” or “Bawk bawk ba-glock,” or “[your best title/caption].” This is a dusty one, a few months old, inspired by noticing someone packing heat in public but wearing the piece casually, more like a shawl or high-riding fanny pack than with the self-seriousness of a safety conscious gun adorner.

Incredible, Edible

Salad season is hard-boiled egg season is now, the time of year when the hens are laying more eggs than we can reasonably consume. So, insofar as batch hard-boiling, here is what I do to hard-boil 18 eggs because the outer shells slough off like boom bam bing nothing.

  • Prepare the pot. Combine and bring to boil.
    • A volume of water that will cover the eggs ≥ 1 inch without boiling over.
    • Teaspoon of salt.
    • 1/2 c. white vinegar
  • Add the eggs and reduce temperature to medium-high for a lower-rolling boil.
    • Boil for 13 minutes.
  • Ferry the eggs to a bowl of ice-cold water. Let rest in the bath of cubes for 15 minutes.
  • As a last step in prep, peel and eat, dry in-shell and store in the refrigerator, or peel and jar with vinegar or brine.
    • For a dozen and a half stashed for lunches and salads, I will peel them, jar them in a half gallon mason jar with apple cider vinegar and dill sprigs, beet juice optional.

With a few minor modifications, this is close to the “perfect” process published on AllRecipes.

Prose Expression Courses

“The cultural needs of the nineteen-sixties will probably determine the shape of the prose expression courses in colleges. Many would say that the needs of any time are the best norm for selection of courses to be used in that time. Certainly it would be safe to say that a course in rhetoric, composition, speech, writing, or communication that did not meet the needs of its time could be put forward only at the risk of failure” (126). #presentism #curriculum #newrhetoric #failure

—Daniel Fogarty. (1959). Roots for a New Rhetoric. Teacher’s College, Columbia.

Keiko, The Good Whale 🐳

“In the summer of 1993, the movie Free Willy—about a captive killer whale that’s heroically set free—was an unexpected hit. But when word got out that the real whale who played Willy, an orca named Keiko, was dangerously sick and stuck in a tiny pool at an amusement park in Mexico City, the public was outraged. If Warner Bros. wanted to avoid a P.R. nightmare and not break the hearts of children everywhere, then it was clear: Someone had to free Keiko—or at least try.” –The New York Times

I drive the 500 miles between Ypsilanti and Christiansburg frequently; when I do, I catch up on podcasts, since they aren’t an especially common part of my everyday media. “The Good Whale,” a six episode season from Serial, dropped late in 2024. Altogether, TGW amounts to 3.5 hours of audio, perfect for a summertime roadtrip. I found it all the more moving because Free Willy was Ph.’s favorite movie around 1995-1996. While it is something of a behind the scenes for that movie, TGW floats at that uncomfortable depth of the known-unknown where animals star in popular movies. The series is a carefully produced blend of historical narrative, investigative reporting, and analysis that lays plain the exploitative impulses and brand safe-guarding behind hit movies and featured attractions. If you’re looking for a podcast this summer, give it a listen. You’ll also pick up a few musical surprises, like Yellow Ostrich’s 2010 track, “Whale.”

“Whale,” Yellow Ostrich, 2010.

Make Much of This Distinction

“We are now inclined to make much of this distinction between amateur and professional, but it is reassuring to know that these words first were used in opposition to each other less than two hundred years ago. Before the first decade of the nineteenth century, no one felt the need for such a distinction—which established itself, I suppose, because of the industrial need to separate love from work, and so it was made at first to discriminate in favor of professionalism. To those who wish to defend the possibility of good or responsible work, it remains useful today because of the need to discriminate against professionalism” (89).

—Wendell Berry (2010). “The Responsibility of the Poet.” What Are People For?: Essays (Second edition). Counterpoint. #professional #amateur #love #work #professionalism

Black Bear Season

Last weekend’s wanderer, a black bear maybe a year or two old, crossing over Rosemary Road. It’s common in late May through the end of June to see bears. They’re a different kind of trouble for F., however, because she would likely chase the bear if she was out off-leash, and it’d be a steep, slow while before any humans could catch up to call her off if she felt and followed such an impulse.

Figure 2. Look, it’s the bear in the road.
About Collectanea

Collectanea is a new, provisional series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the second in this series from Week 23 of 2025, or the Week of June 2). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

Creekside raised bed cabbage shoot. #wonderhollow #rollcall

For The Third or Fourth Time

/ Derek Mueller / 6 Comments

From today’s IHE,
a piece on
double-dipping conference presentations. This is a practice that has been on
my mind somewhat during this, the most conference-intensive stretch of my
current program of study. Of course, the very idea of "double-dipping"
resonates with the bucket (or well) model of invention that, at its best, smacks
of individualism and zero-sum economics and, at its worst, echoes of such
horrifying social
(and professional) improprieties as standing over a vegetable tray at a faculty
gathering and using, re-using, and re-re-using the same celery stalk as a salivated
dipping stick for that zesty ("Maybe dill?") salad dressing. The views included
in the short article range from the cynical to the more generous-spirited.
From the cynical camp, a shot about dumbfounded graduate students who are
oblivious to the ethics of reperforming (revising, retooling, redelivering,
etc.) one’s work:

As Nelson C. Dometrius, a professor of political science at Texas Tech
University, writes in his introduction to [the debate featured in PS:
Political Science and Politics], when he raised the question with senior
faculty members, he received mixed reactions, with people quickly outlining
special cases where they viewed such "double dipping" as justified. When he
posed the same question to graduate students, Dometrius relates, "the modal
reply was a blank stare — a lack of comprehension that presenting the same
paper as many times as you wished would be viewed by anyone as an unusual or
questionable practice."

I don’t know whether this says more about Dometrius, about the graduate
students at Texas Tech (less likely), or about advanced graduate study in
political science (even less likely), but it’s a take that doesn’t carry all
that well over into my own experience developing and giving conference talks in
recent years. If we are not to be flavor-of-the-week-ademics, isn’t some
return inevitable? What’s implied here is that carry-over is suspicious, an
indication that someone is slacking off or falsifying a work record.

On a more nuanced note, the exec. director of MLA–who was quoted in the
article–suggests that re-use is smart and appropriate, especially when you take
audience into account. If the audience is not the same from conference to
conference, the matter of "double-dipping" becomes less a question of
conferencing ethics and more a question of growing one’s vita by dubious means
(i.e., double-dipping as the HGH of higher ed). I would guess this works
very differently when, for a dissertating graduate student, the list of life’s
work is fairly short and centered on a small number of projects than it would
around year six or seven of an assistant professorship, after the chance to give
the dissertation a rest, pour your heart into a couple of different projects,
and perhaps even land a book contract. Artificial vita cultivation and re-tread
scholarship: who really believes there will not come a day of reckoning for
these practices?

One of the messages I return to from early in coursework: you can write
insightfully and meaningfully about your work from any point in it, whether you are just beginning
to find a research question, whether you have written full articles on the
matter, or whether you have dedicated twenty years to this or that interest.
Could this be construed as a kind of one-trick-ponyism? Perhaps. But
it is not easy to decide without knowing better the work in question. Of
course it’s possible to re-use one’s own stuff lazily, but all re-use, all
"self-plagiarism," need not fall into that category of suspicion.

I am tempted to leap to personal anecdotes as a way to wander through this
question a bit more. Those (i.e., the three of you) who have heard more
than one of my conference papers in recent years will recognize overlaps,
recurring interests, and ideas that re-appear because they click. But I am not
giving the same paper in any two cases. Not exactly. Neither am I
writing what I think of as purely original conference papers, since they all
rise from an accumulating slosh of ideas and clusters of interests (providing
copies of them is one measure of verification, but what about those
extemporaneous talks?). The conferencing record is like a listing of
cousins, not strangers, not siblings (most certainly not twins, which seem to be
the concern of the article). But then again,
perhaps I am merely invoking (to the point of abusing?) that graduate student
exemption that grants greater leniency to experimentation, to trying ideas and
presentational styles on for size, while trudging through all of those
pre-professional uncertainties.

I have to stop here, but there are a couple of other matters of interest
touched off by the piece:

  • Self-plagiarism as a concept (closely related: self-citation).
    Also as a hypocritical practice (i.e., teachers forbid undergraduates from
    re-using papers across the curriculum, but themselves–allegedly–do it).
    The article does not provide examples, and the only ones I can think of
    (aside from the obvious sharing of curricular materials, syllabi, etc.) are
    where an article evolves into a book chapter, but this practice is, as far
    as I know, widely accepted.
  • Whether publishing formalities apply to the conferencing circuits.
    If published articles have much greater purchase for tenure, wouldn’t
    self-duplication in formal publications reflect the lackadaisical attitudes
    toward re-used conference materials? Some of this goes back to acceptance
    systems, double-blind peer review, etc.
  • What of the practice of re-using conference proposals? Some lore
    about this circulates–the conference-goer who got in [to XYZ national
    conference] using the exact same proposal. Ethically objectionable? Change
    the title, re-submit the proposal. Does it matter whether the
    conference presentation was "original" if the proposal was a duplicate?
  • Do political scientists study Bakhtin?
  • The table, "Duplicate Presentations, by Year Doctorate Received," is
    fascinating in the trend it projects: by the year 3,000–for better or
    worse–all conference
    presentations will be double-dipped.