How many people actually take the time to check the things they cite? Even worse, how many bother to check what they quote?
I’ve complained about this before.
When I want to cite some seminal bit of information, I usually try to find the primary source and actually find and READ the part I want to cite. I rarely read the whole piece, but I do at least try to verify that the thing I’m claiming this person said is something they actually said.
If I want to quote something, then I try to find the actual source. Google is so wonderful for that – there really is no excuse not to these days (aside from laziness or a lack of integrity).
I’m working on a new book. (Choosing and Using Digital Games in the Classroom – A Practical Guide ) I’m working on chapter 2, which is an introduction to game-based learning. It’s been a real hard slog, as one of the sections is a review of learning theories that play (or should play) a key role in the design of game for learning (turns out very few people mention any learning theory when they talk about the game they designed, but that’s a tale for another post). I’ve had to go and find the original sources along with some contemporary research. It’s been like doing my candidacy all over again.
One of the theories is Activity Theory and there is mention of contradictions in one of the studies I looked at. I wanted to explain what that meant and since I no longer have the article I was talking about (I was using something I wrote some years ago) I did a search and came across this wonderful quote
“contradiction is a misfit within elements, between them, between different activities, or between different developmental phases of a single activity”
It’s perfect. But, since it’s a quote, I wanted to find the original source so I can quote that, rather than the paper that quoted it. You’d think it would be a simple matter of tracking down the citation, right? WRONG.
I did that, and, silly me, I searched for the first word in the quote: “misfit”. It wasn’t there. So, step 2: ask the Great Google to look for the entire quote, which I did. I found PILES of places that used this quote. The image right is just the first page of the search. The ones in yellow used the words, but didn’t indicate it was a quote. The ones in green at least put it in quotes and cited it. Of course, they cited a variety of sources. I didn’t bother to track them all down but I’m guessing the ones that aren’t the original are simply the first place they found.
SO, I go back to the original source. This time I look for the second word in the quote. Lo and behold I found this:
IT’S A DIFFERENT WORD.
It came from here:
Kuutti, K. (1996). Activity theory as a potential framework for human-computer interaction research. Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction, 17-44.
This may not seem like a big deal. After all “unfit” and “misfit” are pretty close. Well, I think it IS a big deal. It indicates that the people who used the phrase (quoted or not) never bothered to look up the original source.
To be fair, a reasonable number of those who cited the quote used the right source, and even the right page number. I did find one paper that had the correct quote, but unfortunately, they didn’t bother to quote it, OR even to cite the source, AND if that’s not bad enough, they actually copied most of the paragraph without quotes or a citation. Now, all I found was the paper itself, which had a copyright notice from a very well known computer science conference, but when I went to look up the paper in the conference proceedings, I couldn’t find it. So, maybe this paper was never accepted (which is why I haven’t listed it here). One can hope.
Maybe this is why it always seems to take me longer to write something that it takes other people.
Was it your intent to illustrate how a subtle change in punctuation can dramatically alter the concept being conveyed?
Setting aside the use of “misfit” and “unfit”, the introduction of the third comma (“…activities, or…”) in the initial quote conveys a completely different concept than expressed in the discovered original quotation (highlighted in blue).
Just a thought. Very interesting blog.
My complaint was more about the fact that far too many people quote things they have never actually checked for accuracy or validity.
The changes do affect the concept being conveyed, but the lack of integrity in the work is, to my mind, a big problem. In academia correctness and honesty are supposed to be paramount. Too often they are compromised – out of laziness, greed, narcissism, to cover incompetence, to advance careers,….
It could also mean that there are two different translations of the same text or more than one version.
But if the original is in English, then there’s no excuse.
true, the one they cite should have the correct phrase as that is the ‘reference’ part of doing a proper academic citation, but a famous one is the John Law’s material semiotics paper… it currently have has over 10 versions, each one is marked with the version number of course, but sometimes translations of it, are not, so… it is a mess. I don’t know the situation of this paper, but there could be manifold reasons for a small word change. There is also the problem of precis, which is found in many theoretical texts, that is where you abstract a person’s original ideas, and combine them with your own to provide the new idea, many theory people in politics do that. Then there are things like, “Life is a continuous creation of increasingly complex forms and progressive balancing of these forms that must develop within the interactive environment” (piaget 1969) …. which is not piaget, not in 1969, etc. etc. but is close to a 1958 piaget and could have been in something 1969…. weee!