a thaumaturgical compendium

I off to New York City for the next couple of days for “Media Diversity and Localism: Meanings, Metrics, and the Public Interest.” I’m presenting some research on how successive presidential campaigns were covered in 1992, 1996, and 2000. My analysis looks, very simply, on the totality of word frequencies in coverage for each year. This alone, of course, doesn’t tell us much about the meaning of this coverage, but I argue it does tell us something about the style and focus of that coverage.

The results? This has been on the back burner for a long time now, and I’m only now getting all the data together. Nonetheless, it appears as though the “prestige press” grew more self-similar over the three elections, while coverage in large–but still mainly local–newspapers remained dissimilar from both the prestige press and itself.

The real question is how ownership affects this balance. I’ll have some preliminary things to say about this during my presentation Tuesday morning, but for now it seems that (perhaps unsurprisingly) co-ownership of two newspapers tends to result in increasingly similar style and content of coverage.

If you are interested in a very preliminary extended abstract, I have a pdf here. When I get back, I may write a bit more about blogging work “in progress,” and why academic blogs often look less than academic. And, more specifically, why I didn’t post interum steps in this research and how research is like democracy and sausage.

… you are not caught?

Of course, this isn’t true, is it. It’s plagiarism because we know when plagiarism occurs. It happens when we take ideas or the embodiment of those ideas without giving credit. But, as academics we do that every day. We give lectures without footnotes, we entertain ideas in our everyday conversations (and in our blogs!) without knowing whether we are plagiarizing.

The question becomes even more difficult when it is one of amount. We had a problem with plagiarism last year among our graduate students; chiefly, but not exclusively, the foreign graduate students. The most egregious case was one of basically knitting together two existing texts, with only a few words here and there to hold them together. (This student was dismissed.) This year we were excruciatingly explicit that this was not acceptable, even having students sign plagiarism statement.

And now, as I look over my papers from my theory class this semester, I find two cases of complete sentences, or parts of sentences, being lifted from documents. In most cases, the documents are cited, but there are no quotation marks around the cut-and-paste sections.

So how many words in a row constitutes an act of textual theft?

Frankly, the question of “property” is not particularly important to me. What is more important is whether the student has understood the ideas the he or she is purportedly espousing. In the case of the student who knitted together the two essays, it was clear that the understanding of the topic was virtually non-existent. But when someone has made use of a number of partial sentences, is it fair to say that they don’t know what they are talking about?

It’s entirely possible, at the extreme end, to imagine a paper that was made entirely of short cut-up pieces of several extant pieces of literature. Is this still plagiarism? Certainly, the size of the chunks matter. If the chunks are single words, then we would consider there to be more authorship, if they are single pages, we would consider it more artifice.

This calls to mind the Chinese Room model, or the Turing Test. The point of these writing exercises is (ostensibly) to evaluate whether the students “know” something. If I want to know if Jack knows about agenda setting (I could have picked symbolic interactionism, but that would have made things far more complicated), I can ask him “What is agenda setting?” What do I do if he hands in McCombs & Shaw’s article?

At one level, that he can produce that seminal article demonstrates that he knows about agenda setting, but it doesn’t say that he knows the theory itself. This quickly devolves into a morass. What, really, is “understanding”? Perhaps it is the ability to apply an idea in another context.

There are other problems. I detected these two cases because of slight differences in style that tipped me off. In my experience, one or two small cut-and-paste pieces means that there are many more that I did not detect. But what about those students who write well enough that it is impossible to detect those sections that are lifted? Or, as in the case last year, what if they are lifting not from published work, but from other student work?

Maybe I have just been grading too much. I didn’t fail either student: zero tolerance doesn’t work. They have rewrites due back to me. I guess I run the rewrites through a checking program. At least it can quantify the amount of material that has been taken from elsewhere.

And what of the policy? It originally said “any two words together” as too much to take. Of course, that is unworkable. This entry, when taken as word pairs, would constitute a single example of plagiarism. What is needed is a clear and clean line–a standard by which we can compare a given text. Considering the difficulties the FCC is having with clear lines lately, I have a feeling this is asking for too much.

Which historical madman were you?

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Precisely. Tesla and Britany Spears were the two mascots of the comm theory class this semester.

I recently posted on Abercrombie’s soft porn catalog, and was somewhat critical of it. Now I want to backtrack firmly to the top of the fence.

I am not really down on advertising. In fact, I *enjoy* many ads when they are done well. Advertising is persuasion, but it is also art. If A&F decides they want to advertise by distributing glossy soft-core porn, I am all for that. My problem is really that consumers lack media literacy–in general, but especially when it comes to advertising. Lots of folks claim that 15-25 year-olds have grown up in a ad saturated world and are therefore sophisticated consumers of advertising. I’ve seen nothing to support this claim.

I *like* the spin VW puts on its cars, Barneys puts on its clothes, Coach puts on its bags. I buy from certain companies because I like their advertising–and I pay for that advertising. Some might criticize this as being shallow, but advertising and branding provide a modern aesthetic texture to our world. I have a feeling that kids are savvier than we give them credit for when they buy these things.

My problem is the lack of understanding: kids really think they are going to be considered one of the beautiful people if they buy A&F clothing. Now, let’s get this straight: they are. Just as VW or BMW drivers take on a particular expected aura, when you put on A&F clothing, you are saying “This is what I value as a lifestyle,” and others who value the same aesthetic are able to track you down. Clothing is the original Friendster.

The problem, especially as expressed in the article, is the author’s shock that it isn’t about the clothes. How is this shocking? We do not buy quality, we buy image. When you are buying image, it doesn’t make much difference if the clothing lasts: it is meant to be disposable.

I tend to buy clothing that is well made, will last a long time, and is comfortable. It’s also nice if it looks reasonably good. But then, I am in a particular place in society that uses other cues to determine whether you are worthy to be part of a group.

This certainly does not stop at clothing. Just because Harvard doesn’t (yet) advertise on TV with preppy white kids playing rugby on the lawn doesn’t mean that isn’t what is selling the school. There are better ways of getting an education. People go to Harvard because they aspire to be Harvard students and Harvard graduates, not because they have evaluated the quality of the education. If the education you seek is one that will lead to large incomes, or if it is an education that will lead to greater horizons, Harvard may not be the best choice. But I suspect most people who go to Harvard are there because they want to go to a school where people who go to Harvard go.

I’m not meaning to pick on Harvard here particularly. I think this applies to most institutions of higher learning, most vacation spots, most clothing lines. My concern is how anyone could have assumed that a catalog is really selling clothing. The author gives another example of what he seems to think of as a “real” catalog, J. Crew, I think. At first, you have to assume he is joking. No, they don’t talk about circle jerks, because that’s not something their customer base expects or wants. But they are very much selling a particular lifestyle. If you want to wear a rep tie, why not wear one from your prep school? Oh, because you didn’t attend a school with a school tie? That’s OK, neither did the others who shop here–we’re all on the same page. (If we had school ties, we would probably buy them elsewhere.)

I was always taken by the television and print advertising in Japan, which felt no loyalty whatsoever to the actual product, only to the feeling it elicited. As advertising inevitably becomes even more enmeshed with our entertainment and news, we need to come to terms with our relationship to it. My only hope is that people are mindful of what is being sold, and how it is being sold.

When I was a teaching assistant, and it came time to do an exam review, I knew I always had a fallback: Jeopardy! But if you had told me I’d be playing Jeopardy with a graduate class, I’d have thought you were crazy. Nonetheless, by request, I played Jeopardy during the last meeting of my Comm Theory seminar.

Wondering how you would do? Here is the game board for Comm Theory Jeopardy. Don’t judge the class or the students too harshly by this–it’s not representitive of the sophistication of either. Note that I am borrowing images here from a game–hooray for fair use. If you would like to alter it for your own purposes, I’ve put everything (including an editable blank “categories” image) in a zip file for your convenience.

Tim Bray has a great entry on building web robots–or at least robots intended for search engines. I may assign this, along with his paper for WWW, for my class in the spring.

Got a half column-inch in the Buffalo News this morning:

Wireless Internet will insinuate the computer even more deeply into our lives, said Alex Halavais, an assistant professor in UB’s School of Informatics who studies new communication technologies.

People, for example, most likely will use their computers more often, for shorter periods of time, much as cell phone users have brief but frequent phone conversations, he said.

I am sure you are wondering what research I am basing this prognostication upon. Um, can I get back to you on that? Maybe because they will have to go get another Frappuccino?