Purdy, James. “Anxiety and the Archive: Understanding Plagiarism Detection Services as Digital Archives.” Computers and Composition 26 (2009): 65-77. ScienceDirect.

Vie, Stephanie. “A Pedagogy of Resistance Toward Plagiarism Detection Technologies.” Computers and Composition 30 (2013): 3-15. ScienceDirect.

Using Turnitin as the primary object of study, Purdy contends that plagiarism detection software should be viewed as digital archives. Like Selfe & Selfe’s argument that interfaces are practical inasmuch as they are ideologically and rhetorically constructed, Purdy examines the rhetorical construction of Turnitin’s claims concerning the legality of its archival functions and construction. Both instructors and institutions can, for a fee, gain access to its archives and contribute students’ work without students’ permission or
explicit knowledge that their work will be archived and serve a function or reach an audience outside of their individual classrooms.

Sidenote: Having only been peripherally exposed to the program, I wondered if students could decline to use it. At St. Petersburg College, students can decline to use Turnitin and “the instructor should provide an alternative assignment and [is] are not allowed to submit a paper into Turnitin.com on behalf of the student.” 

In my search for news stories of students refusing to use the software, I visited Turnitin’s Wikipedia page and stumbled upon this quote: “Lawyers for the company also claim that student work is covered under the theory of implied license to evaluate, since it would be pointless to write the essays if they were not meant to be graded. That implied license thus grants permission to copy, reproduce and preserve, it says.” 

Just because the exigency for a student essay was a class assignment doesn’t mean that’s all it is or ever could be. We as doctoral students are taught to treat everything we write as a potential publication; should we teach undergraduates the same way? If we want to provide transformative learning experiences in authentic contexts, shouldn’t we—at the very least—give them the rights to their own work?

Turnitin claims that its archive’s design and functionality plays a pivotal role in detecting plagiarism, but there is no authorial control vested in the individual instructor or student user, if I’m to be so generous as to claim that Turnitin may consider a student a user. It seems that Turnitin’s archive is the end and means, not an inadvertent repository developed in the name of detecting plagiarism. Instead, the archive seems to be driving the software instead of the students’ and instructors’ needs in attending to the inevitable
anxieties that are part of composing in new contexts and in multivocal environments. Purdy unsurprisingly claims that Turnitin is “protecting corporate rather than democratic interests” and it will adopt and perpetuate the practices that will turn profits, but I wonder why, exactly, institutions and instructors are investing in Turnitin (67). What, exactly, does it offer, or what are instructors told that it offers—or guarantees?

Like Purdy, I am suspicious of the software’s intentions, as the aims of corporate endeavors are unlikely to value composition pedagogies. In reading this case study, I feel as if I’m seeing education do business, pardon the pun, with corporations that do not share the mission and values that higher education purports to serve. I wonder, then, if there really is such a distinction between education and business? Maybe the lines are blurred and, in matters of pedagogy, they need to become clearer.

Purdy’s stance against plagiarism detection software is reflected in Vie’s “Pedagogy of Resistance,” but Vie focuses more on the effects this software has on constructions, understandings, and pedagogies of composition and authorship. Vie argues that plagiarism detection software reinforces the idea of texts as
individually authored and neglects “more communal forms of writing prized in online environments” (3). Vie brushes up against the issue of collaborative authorship and the ways this kind of writing is (and isn’t) valued, particularly within English departments, an issue that I first encountered by way of Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s Single Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (1992). Ede and Lunsford collaboratively co-authored research and texts by mailing handwritten notes on typewritten (as in, composed on a typewriter) manuscripts, arguing for institutional recognition of co-authored texts as valuable contributions and practices that require a shift in the power dynamics of the classroom and academy at large. My experience with these authors coincided with my relationship with my husband, a scientist who is expected to co-author and collaborate on all of his work. Whereas collaboration is assumed, encouraged, and rewarded for him, it has been systematically ignored and consequentially discouraged for me. Even now, most of the collaborative work I do is with my students, and I have been criticized for categorizing that work as collaborative. For example, whereas most instructors call their individual conferences with students—well, Individual Conferences—I generally call them Collaborative Conferences. We sit down together with a shared goal and discuss the best
possible way to conceive of and communicate sets of ideas in writing. To me, that’s collaboration; then again, I consider all writing as inherently collaborative (Thralls, 1992; Speck 2002).