Corpora: History of plagiarism

[Christopher Bader]

It seems to me that this is a misunderstanding both of what plagiarism is
and what literature is.  Plagiarism involves presenting someone else's ideas
as one's own.  Literature deals with stories and themes that are as old as
mankind.  If re-telling a story is plagiarism, then even Homer is a
plagiarist.

A "famous" example of true plagiarism is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
translations
of German philosophers and critics that he presented as his own writing.

Christopher Bader



-----Original Message-----
From: Aisha.Saidi at dictaphone.com [mailto:Aisha.Saidi at dictaphone.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 7:10 AM
To: p.clough%dcs.shef.ac.uk%DICTAPHONE at lhs.com
Cc: corpora at hd.uib.no; owner-corpora at lists.uib.no
Subject: Re: Corpora: History of plagiarism



The most famous case I can think of is Shakespeare, who is said to have
plagiarized freely from the works of other authors.  His play, Othello, for
example, is drawn from a story by the 16th century author, Giraldi Cinthio.
Plagiarism wasn't always considered a bad thing, and today it is still
accepted as a worthy practice for students learning to write.

See Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality 1952 for an interesting
history.

Aisha Saidi






                    "Paul Clough"

                    <p.clough at dcs.sh       To:     <corpora at hd.uib.no>

                    ef.ac.uk>              cc:

                    Sent by:               Subject:     Corpora: History of
plagiarism
                    owner-corpora at li

                    sts.uib.no





                    11/07/01 05:07

                    AM









Dear All,

I would like to compile a short report regarding the history of plagiarism
detection and plagiarism studies in general. Does anyone have examples of
"famous" plagiarism cases or know of work investigating plagiarism
throughout the ages. For example has the increase of information in
electronic form, the development of word processors or access to the
Internet increased the number of plagiarism cases?

I have compiled a report discussing plagiarism detection in both software
and free text. This can be found in HTML form at:
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~cloughie/plagiarism/HTML_Version/index.html and
PDF format at: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~cloughie/papers/Plagiarism.pdf

I am currently compiling a website detailing plagiarism detection
strategies, including references, pointers to commerical plagiarism
detection software and some home-produced software for this interesting
topic.

Thanks,

Paul.


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Paul Clough

Natural Language Processing Group,
Department of Computer Science,
University of Sheffield,
G35 Regent Court,
211 Portobello Street,
SHEFFIELD,
S1 4DP.

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~cloughie/index.html
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