Some thoughts on writing and related topics

A few weeks ago I remember reading a story about the so-called self-plaigarism of regular RadioLab contributor and New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer.  Aside from the general topic of the story, a topic find inherently interesting, I was curious about the story as a regular listener to Radiolab.

At the time I presumed that this self-plaigarism angle would the last I would be hearing about the journalistic practices, if that is the appropriate term, of Lehrer.

Thanks to an article published on Monday that outlines a number of fabricated or misattributed Bob Dylan quotes in his most recent book, Lehrer's journalistic practices have once again come up for discussion.  Of course, unlike with the self-plaigarism issue, in this case Lehrer didn't walk away from the dust up with his job (he has now resigned from his post at The New Yorker).

While it's clear that for a reader or publication an author fabricating sources, quotes, or data is unacceptable and is a firing offence, how one should handle of 'self-plaigarism' is likely not quite as clear cut, and readers and employers may approach the matter differently.

From the perspective of a reader that an author revisits a topic (sometimes with passages take directly from earlier iterations of a work), but each time refining his or her approach, may not be problematic.  Despite the fact that such an iterative approach to writing may not be a particularly common practice in popular literature, there are areas of publishing - like some scholarly domains - where this approach is quite common (Lukes' multiple editions of Power: A Radical View is one such example that comes to mind).   Of course, as a reader I do like knowing when I'm encountering something that I may have read a version of before (While reading Carol Shield's Unless a few years ago I was haunted by a sense of deja vu while reading a scene about gifting a scarf only to realize some number of years later that I'd first encountered a similar passage in one of Shield's short stories.).

Of course it is also important to take into consideration the extent to which author continues to re-engage and refine the ideas and arguments are being examined.  If the 'self-plaigarism' is nothing more than a re-jiggering of paragraphs and paraphrasing of past publications without any new substance then this practice becomes almost valueless to most readers.  In such cases I am inclined to feel duped by the author - and that is almost never a pleasant feeling.

'Self-plaigarism' when viewed from the perspective of the publisher raises an entirely different set of concerns.  Firstly, at least as far as I can see, is the matter of copyright.  If the publisher of second version of the text doesn't provide proper attribution and attain appropriate permissions from the publisher of the first version of the text (maybe because they don't know that the writing isn't all original) might they not have copyright infringement issues on their hands?  And I can't see prominent publications appreciating 'their' content turning up in another publication.

Secondly, I would have to guess that most major publications don't like paying full price for 'recycled' content.  Assuming the ideas discussed in these pieces haven't really been overly refined from iteration to iteration, which I think is a relatively fair assumption in this case given the short/informal nature of many of the posts in question, I can imagine that this breaks the spirit and letter of agreements that authors have with their publishers about submissions.  (I also have to assume that readers don't appreciate paying full price for a publication that has supposedly 'new' content that they may have already read.)

Unfortunately, I think that this confluence of conditions (from both the perspective of the reader and the publisher) and stories like this that that vilify 'self-plaigarism' (and that don't differentiate its various forms) may mean that professional authors may be less likely to re-visit and revise work as time and their understanding of the topic progresses despite the fact that technologies currently available may facilitate such regular revisions of a work and allow the reader to see how this work has been changed with each new iteration.  Though I certainly hope it's not the case, I fear that the appearance of an ever-changing, always-a-work-in-progress text like Whitman's Leaves of Grass may be less likely now than ever before (I can only imagine that what an author was paid to revise a text in the manual type-setting days was relatively little compared to the overall cost of a new printing/edition and would require only marginally more work on the part of the publisher, whereas in the current context a new printing that also entails a re-formatted and re-written document substantially increases printing and re-publication costs relative to just re-printing the same text you already had on file).

I'm not sure that I've really brought this to a satisfying conclusion, but I guess I can always come back to a few of these ideas in the future and see if I can add anything new to the conversation.  If I do take such an approach I'll try to remember to send you back here so you can see what I wrote the first time around.