Humor, Hoaxes, and Software in the Search for Academic Misconduct

Abstract

By contrast, a new generation of independent watchdogs and bloggers interested in academic misconduct employ jokes, pranks, witty pseudonyms, and humorous hoaxes as a part of their critique and as tools of investigation. The new watchdogs represent a significant shift from topdown, bureaucratic, institutionalized detection of academic misconduct toward collaborative discussion, detection, and dissemination. Not only is this work often done for free, but it also is often done with and through humor. Until recently, hoaxes within academia targeted authorities— highly regarded scholars, journals, or disciplines. In 1996, New York University physicist Alan Sokal wrote and submitted an article to Social Text. His goal was to test whether a top cultural studies journal in the United States would publish an article rife with nonsensical claims “if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions” (Sokal, 1996). But unlike Sokal’s relatively straightforward hoax, which Social Text accepted and published, the bloggers and pranksters discussed in this chapter reveal shams through elaborate jokes and stings, crowd participation, and the creation of fictional personae. Furthermore, while hoaxes as a genre target reputable institutions and figures of authority, contemporary misconduct watchdogs’ hoaxes and jokes take aim at fraudsters with a sense of humor. I argue that the detection, critique, and mocking of academic gaming and scholarship have taken a carnivalesque turn. I will discuss changes within the focus of critique by comparing two softwarebased, scholarly article generators released a decade apart: the Postmodernism Generator, created in 1996, and SCIgen, created in 2005. While the creator of the Postmodernism Generator playfully mocks renowned humanities scholars’ jargon through producing Dadaist computergenerated papers, the 21 Humor, Hoaxes, and Software in the Search for Academic Misconduct