Will Google Book Search uncover long-buried literary crimes?
It depends on how you look at it. A plagarist’s nightmare? Maybe. But perhaps the act of creation is, and always has been, a bit more collaborative than what our collective artist-myth has allowed us to believe.
If two works of scholarship are found to have a sentence or two in common, does this diminish the value of one or the other? If so, how so?
How original is originality anyway? Artists routinely borrow concepts and ideas from others who predated them, and call these influences. And, on a darker note, artists often borrow with impunity from contemporaries who have less visibility, less credibility, or a smaller media footprint.
A couple of months ago, a famous video artist — someone with work in the Museum Of Modern Art — was outed on an email list I subscribe to. This artist had copied the website of another video artist, altered the creation date to predate the original site, and had posted it on the Internet as his own.
It was an obvious and direct lift, not a parody or a commentary. The artist who had copied the site, older and far more famous than the doner artist, probably didn’t know about archive.org and how easily illuminated his borrowings might be.
Once outed, the response of the older, more famous artist was silence. No justification or explanation was offered.
Perhaps originality, like history and property, is the prerogative of the winners.
I think Google Book Search is a superb idea, though I don’t want to see digitized books under the control of a corporation replace paper books and public libraries.
Maybe what we’ll find out with tools like Google Book Search is that our ideas of originality in scholarship and art may need to be re-examined.
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