With the advent of digital culture and the ever-greater accessibility of information, many new questions around the concept of authorship arise. Originality and copyrights are challenged once again and must be redefined constantly. While collages, patchworks, appropriation or replication of texts have been around for a long time, the past 20 years have seen an entirely unforeseen development.
Boundaries between authenticity and plagiarism are as blurred as ever (or even more) and there is no easy answer to such matters. And what about self-plagiarism? Such questions have been addressed by a number of authors such as Kenneth Goldsmith, Judy Muller, Jenny Mackness and others. This article will try to present the main issues posed by repurposing and how students could go about when needing to present their own or other people’s content in a different format.
Continue reading Is ‘repurposing’ simply a fancy new word for plagiarism?