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REED-L  May 2002

REED-L May 2002

Subject:

Re: International Undergraduate Shakespeare Journal

From:

Thomas Larque <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

REED-L: Records of Early English Drama Discussion

Date:

Fri, 31 May 2002 15:38:29 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (77 lines)

> This is an interesting concept for students, but I can see several
> difficulties in that there are already many sites on the internet which
> post student papers (and sell student papers) on a variety of
> subjects.  Do we want to add to this?

I can understand the fears about plagiarism.  My current website
(http://shakespearean.org.uk) is based around web versions of historical
criticism and other Shakespeare related material - mostly from the 18th and
19th Century - and I have already come across at least one clear instance of
plagiarism, in which a student apparently gained University credit for
making her own Shakespeare website, which she did simply by stealing the
material from my own website and a number of others.  This was so lazily
done that she had only managed to remove about three-quarters of the
identifying marks which proved that she had cut and pasted essays from my
site rather than transcribed them from original texts herself.

I am sure that others have tried to pass off the content of the essays on my
site as their own writing (some of the search terms used to find my site
suggest that this was the entire purpose of some visits).  Unfortunately
such cheating cannot be prevented, and anybody who publishes any writing
about Shakespeare or other commonly studied authors on the web (including
all online journals dedicated to postgraduate or professional writing) is
likely to become an unwilling accomplice to such acts.  I personally feel,
however, that the benefit of making such materials easily available to those
who wish to use them for acceptable purposes outweighs the (possibly
significant) minority who use them to cheat.  On the positive side, any
suspicious tutor could catch attempted plagiarists using such openly
published texts simply by typing phrases into Google - something not
possible with some of the specialist sites selling essays for the purposes
of cheating.

Again, I understand that publishing Undergraduate level writing will make
plagiarism easier than publishing essays by 19th Century actresses or 21st
Century Professors (since it is much more likely that a tutor will believe
the student to have been capable of creating the work), but I feel that the
benefits that Undergraduates will gain by having their work refereed and
published - thereby gaining early experience of academic publishing at their
own level, and having their work valued - far outweighs the cost of a few
more Internet plagiarists, who would otherwise simply have stolen work from
elsewhere on the Internet.

The main alternative, I suppose, is a print journal - but this would be
expensive to produce and at least initially difficult to distribute, and
would probably require a level of funding and human resources that I simply
do not have access to.  It would also mean that it was much harder for
tutors to catch anybody using the journal for purposes of plagiarism, since
they would not be able to digitally search the journal for matching phrases.

>On the positive side, I'd like to see more papers on
> students' responses to performance, whether by reviewing an early >modern
production (not simply Shakespeare, which only reinforces
> narrow views or myths of The Bard as a god whose works can have
> no serious competition) or
> by recounting experiences of staging early modern drama themselves.
>I've had some excellent papers from my students on their preparation > and
participation in the performance of Shakespeare and many other
>dramatists of the period.

That sounds an excellent idea, and I would certainly want to include student
reviews of books and productions, and more detailed or descriptive papers on
such subjects would be welcome.  Despite being only a mature undergraduate
myself I review both theatre and books for the "Shakespeare Bulletin", and
have gained a great deal from the experience of writing the reviews, and
from having my work published - this is one of the reasons why I am
interested in giving other undergraduates less fortunate than myself a
formal outlet for their work.  I have a special interest in Fringe and
non-Shakespearean productions (other Renaissance Drama and modern
adaptations), and would expect my proposed journal to allow work on a wide
range of other Renaissance Drama and related topics alongside the more
strictly Shakespearean.

Thanks for your comments.

Thomas Larque.

"Shakespeare and His Critics"
http://shakespearean.org.uk

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