Legal plagiarism as technique: using signal noise mathematics as a basis for literary criticism
Please read this if you haven’t already:
As I wrote at the end: This work directly quotes in large part A Buddhist’s Analysis of “The Great Gatsby” : While the Still Eyes of the Witness Watch by Tom Armstrong, names were changes and parts were omitted in the interest of parody and satire. No rights to the quoted material above are claimed nor any insult meant.
But, what is it? It’s a essay about “The Great Gatsby” altered just enough to pass for an essay about “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,”during a casual glance.
What is its purpose? I was inspired by the article by PeterCameron.
http://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/remoteness/
The salient point for me was how to measure error and how to reduce it in a signal noise equation, specifically the idea of nearest neighbor decoding. As a designer, I use these tools all the time as photoshop filters and when I save a file for the web.
It made me think about if there were other creative uses of this concept in literature as there is mathematics. Already there is a clear connection to predicitive text systems in all modern celluar phones. And, likewise, we use nearest neighbor strategies to interpret meaning when one of the words is missing in text message conversation. We all do this constantly.
However, taking it a step further, I wondered if by a simple strategy of taking an exisiting essay about a particular subject and replacing names, dates, pronouns, and conflicting facts I could produce a meaningful or useful product. I think the results of my impromptu experiment are very encouraging.
First, the result is striking where certain arguments seem to be very relevant by coincidence.
Second, the implied arguments, especially where they are discongruous to reality, illicit intriguing (new) questions.
Third, as a practical immediate use the product is a litmus test of reading comprehension for readers of either referenced novels. (At teaching or testing technique for a classroom.)
Finally, it provides insight into the superflous or at least Janus like quality of certain rhetorical writing techniques exhibited by the original author.
As I allude to in the title of this post, I recognize that this strategy of adjusting an exiting work is probably very common, most commonly used to “cheat” on English essays. However, I feel like there are certain skills employed in the process of this act of cheating. Meanwhile, the act of plagiarism is not what I have in mind at all, because I would always consider it important to cite the original author and urge readers / students to read the source after my derivative remix for full comprehension.
