Launch of Georgian Pingba

1. Scissors and Paste
A History of Sharing and Theft in 19th-Century Newspapers

2. Theft or Distribution?
An article is written by a staff writer
at the Fort Myers News-Press and
subsequently the identical text and
video appears in a dozen other
publications within the USA Today
network
@mhbeals #georgianpingbacks

3. Theft or
Distribution?
An article is written by a
staff writer at Reuters
News Agency and the
identical text and image
appears in over thirty
online publications
@mhbeals #georgianpingbacks

4. Theft or Distribution?
An article is written by a
freelance journalist in Mexico
and appears in the Guardian.
Identical text appears in half a
dozen online aggregators and
one independent news site
@mhbeals #georgianpingbacks

5. Theft or
Distribution?
An article appears in
FiveThirtyEight and
subsequently large
sections of text reappear
on the Daily Beast without
attribution to the original
source or author
@mhbeals #georgianpingbacks

6. Attribution is the thing…
…in which we catch the conscience of the editor

7. Anatomy of an Early 19th-Century Newspaper

8. Ingredients of a Successful
Paper

9. Defining
Scissors and Paste
The reappearance of material,
with or without attribution,
with or without minor modification
Largely pejorative
but also used self-deprecatingly
@mhbeals #georgianpingbacks

10. Noticing Reuse
“I find these articles all the time;
these accounts of Chartism or
radicalism that you find in unexpected
newspapers and you think
Wow!
I’ve stumbled onto something here
only to get to the end of the piece and
see Northern Star. It’s so frustrating”

11. Finding Reuse
Computationally
Using plagiarism detection
software, we can scan for text
that appeared multiple times…
…but is this sharing or stealing?

12. Amusement and Derision

13. The Inevitable Backlash

14. Instantaneous communication
the telegraph, telephone, and radio
made scissors and paste obsolete
… eventually …
… but not really …
The Telegraph

15. Theft or Distribution?
@mhbeals #georgianpingbacks

16. The Georgian
Pingbacks
Project
@mhbeals #georgianpingbacks