Roundabout canons

Every academic discipline has a canon. That is to say, a series of texts that most of those who are active in the field have read, or at least have some sort of working understanding of. The exact composition of these texts vary from field to field (and over time), but at any given moment you can be sure that there is a set of books most practitioners within a particular field of knowledge knows about. The canon as a general category, whilst undefined in its particulars, still exists.

It is markedly more defined at local levels. It is especially defined at local sites of education, where there are syllabi that explicitly specify which texts are included in the mandatory coursework. Teachers are expected to know these texts well enough to teach them, and students are expected to read them well enough to mobilize some parts of their content through some sort of practice. Such as writing an essay on just what the mandatory texts have to say.

Invariably, there will be some students who are just not feeling it when it comes to going through the academic motions. Invariably, these students will turn to the internet for an easy way out. Invariably, some of these students will yoink a text from the internet and turn it in as if it were their own.

Thing is. If the texts and/or the subject matter remains the same over the years, patterns will emerge. Students will be faced with the same task of producing some work on a topic, and they will conduct the same web searches year after year. And, if general laziness is a constant, they will find the same first-page results and turn them in, unaware of their participation in an ever more established tradition. [A fun sidenote: I have a few blog posts which receive a boost in traffic two times a year, which coincide very closely to when their subject matter is taught at my local university.]

What I wonder is - how many times does a particular web-copied text need to be turned in before those in charge of grading start to recognize it? Or, phrased another way: how many iterations does it take for these easy-to-find texts to become part of the local canon?

A canon is wider than merely those lists found in official documents, such as syllabi. Informal inclusion is a very real phenomena, and when a particular text keeps showing up again and again and again -

Now there is food for thought.