My colleague, Lisa Pfaff, passed on an interesting article this morning from Slate. In the article, Dead Plagiarists Society, author Paul Collins contemplates the use of Google Book Search as a tool to detect plagiarism in the literary tomes of yesteryear.
Given the popularity of plagiarism-seeking software services for academics, it may be only a matter of time before some enterprising scholar yokes Google Book Search and plagiarism-detection software together into a massive literary dragnet, scooping out hundreds of years’ worth of plagiarists–giants and forgotten hacks alike–who have all escaped detection until now.
More to come later?