A couple of weeks ago I said on social media that I would blog about the very earliest origin of the plagiarism accusations against Carla Rossi, so here it is.
In several of her many attempts at self-defence, Rossi says that the only basis for my accusation of plagiarism is the borrowing of a few lines (describing the Office of the Dead in the manuscript she calls the De Roucy Hours), e.g. here:
[Click to enlarge] [Source] |
But let's look at the context in which I first mentioned plagiarism. (At the time I had no idea that it would turn out to be such a small tip of a very large iceberg!). Note that I was writing to Nancy Impellizzeri, who had emailed me and introduced herself as "research fellow at the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition, based in Switzerland (www.receptio.eu/mainproject)", i.e. RECEPTIO.
Here is the start of my email to her:
What I want to highlight today is the second paragraph:
"Considering how often you use the "©" symbol on the website, I find it extremely ironic that you have now taken Erik Drigsdahl's intellectual property (which, since his death, is only available because I host it on my website: e.g. this page has material taken from here or the archived copy here) -- but you have removed his copyright statement from the bottom of the page, and have not acknowledged it as his work!"
Of course the RECEPTIO page has now been deleted, and someone (we all know who) has also had all trace of it removed from the Wayback Machine a.k.a. The Internet Archive, so the first link above does not work, but the other two links are still live, so you can see what I am referring to in my email.
Erik's pages all have a copyright notice at the bottom, as shown at the top of this post, like this:
Rossi had taken a screenshot of this page, removed Erik's name and copyright notice, and put the image on her own RECEPTIO page for the De Roucy Hours.
This is a large part of the reason I wrote in my email, "I have never seen such a blatant example of plagiarism."
[For the sake of transparency I reproduce the whole email message below]
Yours,
Peter, I wonder whether it isn't partly the 'publish or perish' atmosphere, and partly the social media phenomenon which has led to lowering standards, even though English scholars have had reason to complain, for more than a century, of the comparative laxity shown by a couple of European regions.
ReplyDeleteConclusions of my research, shared online in research-summaries - and particularly research into one manuscript - has been so constant and persistent that on several occasions I've had to republish older blogposts in proof of who was imitating whom. Bad enough when entire passages are lifted, but social media has seen develop a still more pernicious practice - co-opting an argument's conclusion, spreading it widely in a way that leads others to infer the 'idea' original to the plagiarist, while depriving others of the research evidence, argument and apparatus by refusing to acknowledge their source.
That we publish in blogposts might also be part of the problem; I think amateurs, and some students, regard a blogpost as unofficial, or like some anonymous 'wiki' article. For would-be specialists, of course, there's no such excuse - and there's no doubt this problem is escalating rapidly. You have my sincere sympathy and best wishes.