All the things she said...and he said....and me.

If recent proposals for legislation over copyright tell us nothing else, they tell us (clearly) that authorship has become increasingly complex in our digital age. Or, perhaps, has simply made that complexity very, very visible.

It's a conflict that instructors and students know well. Our school charters and handbooks come equipped with plagiarism policies and our course syllabai detail the penalties of violating them. Instructors stress originality, individual voice, and creativity....while asking students to include an increasing number of outside sources in their work. These are important lessons--knowledge doesn't exist in a vacuum. We prove that we know what we know by engaging in conversations with others in those fields. Verbally or visually, that means acknowledging the other communicators that are out there and then having them respond to us and to each other.

But what happens when that knowledge is just a hyperlink away? Or when the sheer proliferation of available information makes it difficult to discern between "expert" sources and "amateurs?"

Accusations of plagiarism in the composition classroom are loaded. Instructors often feel violated when they receive plagiarized works, as if these texts somehow reflect a students' character or opinion of the instructor. Students plagiarize because they are lazy, disrespectful, inattentive, or (to be horribly politically incorrect) "dumb." In fact, a lot of the things instructors say about plagiarism seem to echo the attitudes Joseph Williams describes towards grammatical errors in his essay "The Phenomenology of Error." Responding to critical language regarding poor grammar, Williams says:

The last thing I want to seem is sanctimonious. But...what happens in Cambodia and Afghanistan could more reasonably be called horrible atrocities. The likes of Idi Amin qualify as legitimate oafs. Idiots we have more than enough of in our state institutions. And while simply [sic] illiteracy is the condition of billions, it does not characterize those who use disinterested in its original sense (152).

In many ways, I'd say instructor responses to plagiarism follow a very similar line. Intellectual theft is a serious crime...but how many of our students are truly operating under the intent of claiming someone else's work as their own? In amateur works, uncertainties and incomplete understanding about citation and "proper" research can lead to shortcuts or mistakes that, to all intents and purposes, look like plagiarism.

Jim Ridolfo and Danielle DeVoss take a different approach towards information appropriation. For them, research becomes a matter of remixing old information into something new. In other words, "[r]emixing—or the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and video and stitching them together to form a new product—is how individual writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. Remix is perhaps the premier contemporary composing practice." In order for them to approach writing as a remix, however, Ridolfo and Devoss stress that instructors need to get rid of the idea that remix is simply cutting and pasting, or that this process is restricted only to music. Remixing is any type of composition where something new is created from bits and pieces of other works that have either been recontextualized and/or modified by the new "author." 

Remixing and composition can be a tricky subject. Blatant intellectual theft is a problem and those distinctions need to be explored. But viewing research and research papers as remixes of other information allows us to participate in the idea of diaspora that Paul Butler explores in his article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies." By viewing knowledge as shared and transformable, it opens the possibility for solid research in multiple genres, styles, and mediums.