Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
par 1. "Turnitin.com—as both a writing assessment tool and a kind of authoring environment itself—reifies identity categories via apparent metaphors disguised as informative educational content. Advertised as remedial pedagogy, the Turnitin.com service socializes student writers toward traditional normality and docility notions."
par 2. plagiarism definitions "draw[] on the Latin plagium (‘net to entangle game’)"; "given that plagiarism inherently threatens or undermines a masculinist authorial paradigm, the discourse of plagiarism (i.e., rules, regulations, proscriptions, and policies) often includes sub-narratives or catechisms centering on textual deviance that posit authorship as straight, masculine, and originary, and plagiarism as deviant, feminine, and destructive."
par 4. "whether matches turn up or not, the document sent back to the client is hardly an exact duplicate at all but rather a text repurposed to fit the originality report interface. In effect, all papers submitted for screening are reframed or 'remediated,' to use Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's (1999, p. 45) term, to highlight the possible web-based origins of submitted texts"; "[N. Katherine] Hayles suggested that '[t]o change the material artifact'—by building literary documents on a screen rather than a page, for example—'is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably changes the meanings of the words as well' (p. 23)."
par 5. "The originality report, I would argue, is a remediated “material artifact” which, in recoding a submitted paper (a text document) to reflect the presence or absence of borrowed materials, transforms “the context and circumstances” within which student writing is read and assessed"
par 11. "these recent sample reports [using example-papers about serial killers & identity mix-ups] can be read as a field of [what Barthes calls] 'referential symbolism' (p. 52) where seemingly nonessential allusions to murder and mistaken identity evoke an essential and essentializing equation of plagiarism with (masculine) brutality and (feminine) deception"
par. 13 "As referential symbols, at least, these documents inherently brand plagiarists, to adapt Howard's language, as pathological, deceitful, diseased, and/or violent."
par 14. "how does plagiarism detection as an industrial/infrastructural solution to plagiarism deploy, extend, or challenge the identity constructs inherent to plagiarism? One immediate and simple answer is that plagiarism detection solutions—which build on the assumption that plagiarism by definition represents a false or mistaken authorship—inherently cast plagiarists as significantly different from other categorically true writers."
par 15. "The originality reports are in and of themselves symbolic markers of this difference," creating, as they do, "remediated material artifact[s]" which, as term-coiners Bolter & Grusin would expect, are also "remedial in the strict, pedagogical sense as well."
par 16. "plagiarism, like authorship more broadly, makes sense only when charted against a broader set of 'signifying forms' (Coombe, 1998, p. 29) pertaining to literary, legal, and pedagogical institutions"; "the product name—originality report—clearly capitalizes on the well-entrenched Romantic notion that real authors produce original works of art essentially free of undocumented source"; thus "if the unoriginal or illegitimately copied student paper inherently means a kind of unhealthy or diseased alterity, then clearly the originality report—as both figure and signifying form—functions as a kind of remedial or therapeutic device designed to index and recode in relation to standards of health and normalcy."
par 18. "Color-coded, indexed, and, where appropriate, rife with hyperlinks, the report bears the likeness and functionality of a web page and thus mirrors the process and formal mode by which plagiarized texts are often assembled"; "As hypertextual construction, the originality report faces off against its exteriorized other—the submitted text—and assumes power over its surfaces. The act of public exposure lies here, as well as in the subtle inversion of traditional author positions by which Turnitin.com assumes ownership of the resulting text product and then sells it back (as an exact duplicate) to the client."
par 25. "Turnitin.com—as self-proclaimed teaching resource and, for more students each day, a required component in the writing process—produces and distributes “an ethical technology of subjectivity that creates in students a healthy respect for the authority of the academy” (Crowley, 1998, p. 217)"; "In submitting their papers, writers submit to the color-coded reconstruction of their texts and, more profoundly, their identities as writers, insofar as the originality report frames every submission in terms of its program-driven assessment of similarity. In brief, all writers who participate in Turnitin.com's screening process provide, willingly or not, material support for the corporate detour known as plagiarism detection. In that sense, student writing functions as input or raw material for post-industrial corporate production. This production is an authoring: what comes in is something received, what comes out is a product"
par 31. "The interesting irony remains that if the service were actually to work in pre-empting or preventing plagiarism at large, there would eventually be no need for Turnitin.com or its competitors"; "Turnitin.com writes itself legible as a normative teaching and learning tool, even while its chief operation is to encode scriptural abnormality"