On the "appropriation" wank that has been occupying a fair portion of my flist

[petronia]

You people are way too nice, you know that? XD; Too nice, too disinclined to raise a fuss, too willing to give the benefit of the doubt, too worried about jumping the gun and hurting someone else's feelings. I'm talking from the inside of a glass house here because I'm like that too. Short of someone completely C&Ping my work and claiming it as their own, I cannot really bring myself to care - in The Real World these issues are settled with money, and it's not like I'm making any off my LJ/fandom activities to begin with. (The people who care a lot, I suspect, come to it from the POV of "in Academia these issues are settled with reputation.")

Thing is, if you're one person, you're being nice. If you're ten people, you're sending the message that it's okay. So I have learnt a lesson from being on the outside of this kerfuffle.

Comments

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

may i ask which appropriation wank this is?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Hikaru no Go, and it's pretty much over now, which is why I'm posting about it. XD;

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

and here i had enshrined hikago as something associated only with goodness and light! damn. XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

An over-abundant crop of goodness and light is the problem with HikaGo, really (see below thread). XD;

[qem_chibati]

Yeah but if you read through the first bunch of examples and you really don't see it - it's hard to want to investigate further.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

That's fine, of course, but - well, a lot of people were saying that the issue should have been handled privately first. Which I am all for in most circumstances, but I know and love the core people involved (and many of those giving opinions) all too well, and if no one had been the bull in the china shop the way bookshop was, each person would have privately 1) decided their personal writerly perogative was not worth kicking up a fuss, or 2) emailed lundi, who would have "disagreed", and nothing more would have been said because no one would have brought herself to kick up a fuss. And everyone would have thought it was just the one-time borderline thing and not seen the pattern that is now apparent, to me and to others. Heck, people have been emailing me privately giving additional examples from their own fic!

There's a larger issue here, which is that I've seen two or three wanks in HnG by now, and it always follows the same pattern - circling of wagons against the awful person who shock horror vapours was so awful as to say something PUBLIC and UN-NICE in this our nicest of nice fandoms, followed by gradual grudging concession that maybe awful person at least had a point that bore consideration, despite the awful "tone" in which they said it that made all of us want to dismiss it outright. :P Maybe this wasn't you, but I suspect many of my friends are woman enough that they would admit it's not unlike them.

[troisroyaumes]

Well, I have to admit it's not unlike me. ^^; Reading the post and your comment here, I feel duly chastised though I must add that I do think the consensus always looks more monolithic from the outside than it does from the inside.

commenting on the 'academia' bit

[emblem.livejournal.com]

Well, in science there are always like six papers on the same thing from a zillion angles XD.

The actual stealing goes on more behind the scenes I think -- meaning in grant proposals, which the public and the lower tiers of academia never see, and it's usually the setup and the cool tech that is being stolen ("I was inspired by your talk at the last conference!").

The published stuff is never worth stealing, because it's been DONE. (If you put out something similar people tend to figure that you just lost the race.)

Re: commenting on the 'academia' bit

[cis.livejournal.com]

in the humanities, though, I've seen entire friendships and academic relationships ruined over the question of who came up with an idea first, and who ought to have credited whom. Obviously there are tight groups of sympathetic thinkers who are very good at sharing ideas in common, and who want their mutual ideas to be talked about as much as possible in order to gain as much traction as possible. But there's also this pesky thing where one has to be constantly published in order to keep one's job - if someone you met at a party writes an article that jumps the gun on a theory you're basing a book around, and you're sure the theory was new to them when you told it, that person has essentially pushed you back down the ladder in order to get a few rungs forward. You're going to have to go back to your manuscript and add a bit that says "as [partygoer] says in [international journal of stealin]", or else you look like you're not up to date with what's happening in your discipline, or like you're trying to steal their idea uncredited. And this is galling.

Also: consider the case of Rosalind Franklin.

Re: commenting on the 'academia' bit

[emblem.livejournal.com]

True. Though I was talking of copying, not so much stealing data in a way such that the it becomes completely unpublishable, which is what happened to Franklin. Franklin didn't get to publish at all. (This is worse. Yes. It's just not what I meant in my comment.)

(Though, in the high-throughput data sets of today, a whole bunch of groups can mine a 11-gig sequencing file and publish lots of times on it.)

Re: commenting on the 'academia' bit

[troisroyaumes]

Heck, even a single group can publish ten papers from one data set (coughManolisKelliscough).

Franklin did publish, by the way; she has a paper in the same issue of Nature as Watson and Crick. Of course, W&C precedes her in page number, and well, sexism being what it was, everyone focused on the two young dashing up&comers.

Re: commenting on the 'academia' bit

[emblem.livejournal.com]

Wow, I can't believe I DID NOT KNOW THAT. *shameface*

(Well now I do!)