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September 2023

Braiding Nuances: The Measure of All Things

How does plagiarism detection software define academic integrity?  This probing question was articulated to analyse and make visible the tools' impacts on students, faculties, the institution, and by that, its implications on the system.

Just Future Co-Lab
Dr. Kush Patel
Care Matters and Justice Dreams
Lab
Guidance
Lab Project

Project : Intersectional analysis, Weaving analytical artifact

How are everyday technologies of quantifying the human also hegemonic technologies?

What connections between personal data and community surveillance norms do these technologies encode and amplify? How might the digital humanities-led methods of critical making help us unpack, visualize, and share the entwining of these complexities? What new tapestries of anti-surveillance ethics might emerge from a process of recounting, archiving, and transmitting information as weaving?

Surveillance

Personal Data

CRITICAL MAKING

Technology

Digital Labour

Process

Experiment with the medium of weaving to analyze and represent specific workplace contexts

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Secondary Research

  • Algorithmic oppression,

  • data feminism,

  • quantified self

  • data privacy laws,

  • workplace surveillance,

  • sousveillance,

  • Foucauldian principles.  

Inquiry

Establishing inquiry:

  • plagiarism detection software,

  • anti-surveillance,

  • critical pedagogy

Primary & Analysis

​Engaging with plagiarism detection software:

  • privacy policies,

  • terms and conditions,

  • data projection law

Critial Artifact

Making repetitive techniques of weaving bring interactive storytelling into form

Primary Research & Analysis

Analysis of primary documents revealed many rules that plagiarism software's website implements that contradicts the core values of academic integrity - the very thing it promises to encourage. This includes not acknowledging its users for their comments, ideas, inputs through feedback to the website, it states that it holds the rights to build on or use those ideas in any way for its business including monetary benefits. The fact that it has no moral obligation to credit the users goes against why plagiarism is seen as problematic(not acknowledging and crediting appropriately). Another serious impact is that of the aggregation of student personal data including device id, names, demographic data and educational record to help in grading a student's work. Students whose first language is not English for example are falsely accused of presenting plagiarised work. These instances highlight the encoded biases and data politics that amplify the existing biases that see certain students to inherently commit cheating. Even if the students are cleared to have not committed plagiarism it still is part of their academic record. This storage of personal data cannot be withdrawn by students but only by the institute and the website. Therefore students who have been wronged are left with no opt out option and at higher risk of their work being marked as with higher probability of plagiarised content. Streamlining assessments and narrowing the standards that are to be met becomes a way to normalise imposed ideals. Ideals could be expectations of a certain way/style of writing as well and students could be accused if they deviate from a narrow set of standards

Analysis and close reading of primary documents

Braiding Nuances into Palpable Analysis 

Making visible the otherwise overlooked tensions of technological tools. Communicating the ethical complexities of the technological tool of quantification through critical making.

Analysis to Artifact

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To make carceral logic embedded in the algorithm subjecting institutes to ideas of discipline and punishment visible, an artifact was woven.

 

Weaving was a method of thinking about and understanding the complexities of the system.

 

It was essential to making the complexities and restrictions of plagiarism detection software palpable. The woven piece also was a way to express how coded norms are restricting academic integrity practices with respect to plagiarism in educational institutions. The woven article is an analytical piece. The contradictions and issues that were listed, clubbed and picked from the primary documents such that it could be woven as the weft elements which represent the constraints that come with using plagiarism detection tools - ethical issues and constraints that are encoded in the software.

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Two analytical sides of the woven artifact

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Key to read the woven artifact

© 2024 Sowmya Chandrasekaran 

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