I have to admit, at first I was a bit apprehensive about the sampling project. I wasn't quite sure what we were supposed to do or where are thoughts were supposed to come from. After class on Wednesday, I got a much clearer understanding of what a "visual argument" entails. It is not quite what I expected; the example in class seemed like just a simple picture to me. While there were some clear ides being represented, it was hard to get the exact concept the author was representing without his/her presence. I would assume that a good visual argument may be clear, however I think that there is always room for personal interpretation.
Also, I expected the picture to be more of a collage than this one. I was brainstorming ideas for my own project and it was alot of combining ideas or quotes from the reading into a large collage, but now I think I am going to take a different path; I'm not giving that away though. =)
Just for fun, I was going to use a poll to ask a question but I don't think there is a way you all can type in your own answers. So here are two questions, I am a huge nerd and love Halloween, post your answers on the comments if you so desire!! What are you going to be for Halloween? What was your best costume ever?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Free Culture
I have to admit, I was not thrilled to read 60 pages of a book for English class on top of every other commitment I have had this week. However, upon reading the first four chapters of Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture-The Nature and Future of Creativity" I learned to think outside of the box about authorship.
I have always considered music, television, paintings and other forms of "creativity" to be authorship, and this book gives solid reasons to continue to think this way. I really enjoyed reading factual concepts such as the dates that Disney created Mickey Mouse and the date that the radio stations were created; however I lack understanding for almost all things political. In every day life, politics bore me to death, and while I do have opinions on certain issues, I never really become interested in the hows and whys of systems or politics. Much of these first four chapters, while the examples were interesting, did express some political situations I am not familiar with.
For example, one of the main concepts addressed was piracy. Lawrence describes piracy as taking something of value to someone else and use it as your own without permission (Lessig 18). This sounds simple, right? Wrong, or at least for me. As I continued reading I found myself getting lost in the explanations as to why an instance was or wasn't a case of piracy. As I mentioned, I am not a big "think of the box" person when it comes to things such as this, but I do try. (Of course my way of trying consisted of looking to see if other posted on their blog about the subject to see if I could gain a better grasp on the material-unfortunately for me, Andy seems to know what he is talking about too well for me to understand as well, haha.)
Perhaps the reason I never think about these politics, or in this case the hows and whys of authorship and piracy is because of the last point Lessig makes in Chapter 4: "Every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy" (Lessig 61). If you think about it, there is nothing false about this statement...even if something seems origional, there was probably an outside influence somewhere on this idea. I am not saying that ll creativity is dead, but Lessig says,"The key to success is the brilliance of the differences" (Lessig 23).
I have always considered music, television, paintings and other forms of "creativity" to be authorship, and this book gives solid reasons to continue to think this way. I really enjoyed reading factual concepts such as the dates that Disney created Mickey Mouse and the date that the radio stations were created; however I lack understanding for almost all things political. In every day life, politics bore me to death, and while I do have opinions on certain issues, I never really become interested in the hows and whys of systems or politics. Much of these first four chapters, while the examples were interesting, did express some political situations I am not familiar with.
For example, one of the main concepts addressed was piracy. Lawrence describes piracy as taking something of value to someone else and use it as your own without permission (Lessig 18). This sounds simple, right? Wrong, or at least for me. As I continued reading I found myself getting lost in the explanations as to why an instance was or wasn't a case of piracy. As I mentioned, I am not a big "think of the box" person when it comes to things such as this, but I do try. (Of course my way of trying consisted of looking to see if other posted on their blog about the subject to see if I could gain a better grasp on the material-unfortunately for me, Andy seems to know what he is talking about too well for me to understand as well, haha.)
Perhaps the reason I never think about these politics, or in this case the hows and whys of authorship and piracy is because of the last point Lessig makes in Chapter 4: "Every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy" (Lessig 61). If you think about it, there is nothing false about this statement...even if something seems origional, there was probably an outside influence somewhere on this idea. I am not saying that ll creativity is dead, but Lessig says,"The key to success is the brilliance of the differences" (Lessig 23).
Monday, October 15, 2007
Plagiarism Experience
This project ended up being much more complicated than I imagined. Like most people in the class, I assumed it would be easy to plagiarized a paper, definitely easier than writing it the way we have always learned. However, I found this to be quite the opposite.
At first I wrote my paper (on the topic of the history of Roman paintings) the way I normally would, including my own ideas/reflections and sources. After I took out all of the sources, I still only had a 25% plagiarized paper so I was forced to take out some of my own ideas and add in more plagiarized ones. I eventually ended up plagiarizing over 90% of my paper, and then had to scale it back and put some of my own knowledge back in. This was a huge struggle for me; I found it very hard to balance the amount that my paper was plagiarized.
Another aspect of this project that was challenging was hiding my sources. My paper was very factual and leaned toward being a research paper, so there was much information on the web about it, as well as great books to use. My initial thought was that the plagiarism would then be hard to spot in the exact source because many websites say essentially the same things, just in a different word order. This also then brought up a dilemma though, what if I plagiarized something I didn't mean to-what if the information I thought of on my own was really in a website?
Along with the physical writing of the paper, the hardest challenge for me was being comfortable with the situation. Even though our assignment was to plagiarize, I could not help but feel guilty performing this act. As I mentioned in class, I am an over-quoter normally, so it was especially hard for me to just disregard sources. I thought the ghostwriting paper brought up a moral dilemma for me but jeez, I still feel guilty about this paper. How could anyone actually turn in a paper and a) think they are not going to get caught and b) live with themselves for the agonizing weeks that it takes to get the paper back? Now, seeing as how this was an assignment, I am sure I will get over my guilt; however if I turned in a plagiarized paper outside of this assignment, I feel like I would be haunted by it every time I had to hand in a paper for the rest of my college career.
This being said, I enjoyed the opportunity to experience plagiarism, and I did in fact learn more about my writing style. I am also looking forward to searching for other people's plagiarism!
Since my paper was about the history of Roman Paintings, here is one of my favorites by Raphael called "The Nymph Galatea"
At first I wrote my paper (on the topic of the history of Roman paintings) the way I normally would, including my own ideas/reflections and sources. After I took out all of the sources, I still only had a 25% plagiarized paper so I was forced to take out some of my own ideas and add in more plagiarized ones. I eventually ended up plagiarizing over 90% of my paper, and then had to scale it back and put some of my own knowledge back in. This was a huge struggle for me; I found it very hard to balance the amount that my paper was plagiarized.
Another aspect of this project that was challenging was hiding my sources. My paper was very factual and leaned toward being a research paper, so there was much information on the web about it, as well as great books to use. My initial thought was that the plagiarism would then be hard to spot in the exact source because many websites say essentially the same things, just in a different word order. This also then brought up a dilemma though, what if I plagiarized something I didn't mean to-what if the information I thought of on my own was really in a website?
Along with the physical writing of the paper, the hardest challenge for me was being comfortable with the situation. Even though our assignment was to plagiarize, I could not help but feel guilty performing this act. As I mentioned in class, I am an over-quoter normally, so it was especially hard for me to just disregard sources. I thought the ghostwriting paper brought up a moral dilemma for me but jeez, I still feel guilty about this paper. How could anyone actually turn in a paper and a) think they are not going to get caught and b) live with themselves for the agonizing weeks that it takes to get the paper back? Now, seeing as how this was an assignment, I am sure I will get over my guilt; however if I turned in a plagiarized paper outside of this assignment, I feel like I would be haunted by it every time I had to hand in a paper for the rest of my college career.
This being said, I enjoyed the opportunity to experience plagiarism, and I did in fact learn more about my writing style. I am also looking forward to searching for other people's plagiarism!
Since my paper was about the history of Roman Paintings, here is one of my favorites by Raphael called "The Nymph Galatea"
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Reflection on Ghostwriting
Here is me as a ghostwriter:
Ah Ghostwriting. At first, I was all for the ghostwriting experience, and I was even thinking about creative ways I could be a nurse and a ghostwriter on the side since writing is enjoyable to me. After completing this assignment however, I have a few more ethical concerns about this subject. I ghostwrote some essays for Justinn (talked about in the previous blog) for medical school applications. While writing these types of essays and personal statements is generally difficult when they are your own, I assumed writing Justinn's would be easier since I am not afraid to talk him up. Quite the opposite seemed to be true however.
Justinn gave me some notes on specific experiences he wanted to talk about, and I pretty much filled in the rest according to the specifications of the essay. Justinn had much say in revising these essays since I had a hard time writing about some of his experiences such as biochemical research. This involvement from him was rather unexpected, because I just always assumed that ghostwriters write the work, then the person who is claiming authorship reviews it, only fixing major concepts that are not aligned with their personal views. Perhaps it was different in my case because of the nature of the essays, and the fact that they were all rather short made it easier to be picky about certain sentences and words. All this being said, the overall experience was interesting, and I ended up feeling just the opposite about ghostwriting than I thought I would; I cannot help but feel guilty or just not right in general. However, if I was getting paid and there were contracts signed etc. I think I would feel better about it.
Overall this assignment did not change my relationship with the author, if anything, it improved the relationship because I learned more about him and his life experiences leading him to a medical profession.
Also, I do not think I changed who I am as an author. Again, because of the nature of these essays, and the fact that they contain a completely different style of writing than formal papers, I think my perceptions of myself remained constant. However, it was interesting in class to hear other people realizing they have their own personal style to writing; this is something I would be interested to know about myself.
Ah Ghostwriting. At first, I was all for the ghostwriting experience, and I was even thinking about creative ways I could be a nurse and a ghostwriter on the side since writing is enjoyable to me. After completing this assignment however, I have a few more ethical concerns about this subject. I ghostwrote some essays for Justinn (talked about in the previous blog) for medical school applications. While writing these types of essays and personal statements is generally difficult when they are your own, I assumed writing Justinn's would be easier since I am not afraid to talk him up. Quite the opposite seemed to be true however.
Justinn gave me some notes on specific experiences he wanted to talk about, and I pretty much filled in the rest according to the specifications of the essay. Justinn had much say in revising these essays since I had a hard time writing about some of his experiences such as biochemical research. This involvement from him was rather unexpected, because I just always assumed that ghostwriters write the work, then the person who is claiming authorship reviews it, only fixing major concepts that are not aligned with their personal views. Perhaps it was different in my case because of the nature of the essays, and the fact that they were all rather short made it easier to be picky about certain sentences and words. All this being said, the overall experience was interesting, and I ended up feeling just the opposite about ghostwriting than I thought I would; I cannot help but feel guilty or just not right in general. However, if I was getting paid and there were contracts signed etc. I think I would feel better about it.
Overall this assignment did not change my relationship with the author, if anything, it improved the relationship because I learned more about him and his life experiences leading him to a medical profession.
Also, I do not think I changed who I am as an author. Again, because of the nature of these essays, and the fact that they contain a completely different style of writing than formal papers, I think my perceptions of myself remained constant. However, it was interesting in class to hear other people realizing they have their own personal style to writing; this is something I would be interested to know about myself.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Ghostwriting and Plagiarism: One in the same?
So we have learned about Ghostwriting and Plagiarism now, and it seems to me the lines can be blurred quite a bit. For instance, I am ghostwriting some of my boyfriend's (Justinn's) essays he needs for applying to medical school. And despite what I said about him in class, he did have a choice to let me help him, and trust me he doesn't always like the fact that I am better than him at writing. (although this is the only subject I can compete with him at an academic level!) I couldn't help but post a picture he is too cute! In some cases he knows how he wants to answer the questions but cannot figure out how to articulate them into a paragraph, keeping it under the word number limit. In other cases, he has absolutely no idea what to say. Now, is it plagiarism if I help him articulate his thoughts? What about if I completely go off of my own knowledge of his life experiences and completely write the essay for him? This is where I have problems, we are supposed to ghostwrite a paper or essay, but at what point is it plagiarism? If he would turn it in? What about if he just used the ideas I wrote for him and reworded them? I would be tempted to say that ghostwriting in this case does coincide with plagiarism a great deal. Medical schools want to hear your voice in the essay, and if they are suspicious they can also look at the essays the students write for their MCAT's.
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