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Davis M.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Feb 1 1995

Herman Berg, an independent investigator of the history of computing, has been distressed since 1984 because he believes he was unjustly deprived of the credit of locating the original version of a historically important letter, well known in translation, from Charles Babbage to L. A. J. Quetelet [1]. His beef was first with the AFIPS Annals of the History of Computing, which declined to publish any of his many rambling communications about his accomplishment until, with some Annals-initiated assistance, he submitted his story in an acceptable form [2]. His second and far more energetically pursued complaint was with The works of Charles Babbage [3], in which he was not mentioned as the person who used the University of Michigan online searching system to locate the original letter in a Belgian collection of Quetelet’s papers.

Philosopher Davis says this failure to give Berg the credit he seeks is “as bad as much plagiarism (and, indeed, is hardly distinguishable from it).” He tells “a long and sad tale” [4] of Berg’s unsuccessful effort to persuade almost every kind of government and academic authority to investigate this molehill, which is, sadly, Berg’s mountain.

One can sympathize, to a limited extent, with Berg, and to a greater extent with those poor, innocent, helpless bureaucrats throughout the world who replied in remarkably civil and restrained tones to his avalanche of complaining correspondence, but one can only cry stop! to Davis’s effort to extend the definition of plagiarism to include this kind of triviality. Perhaps Davis is taking the position of Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice in Through the looking-glass [5], “When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.”

Possibly as an inadvertent oversight or perhaps with unconscious irony, Davis does not acknowledge in any way the source of the title of his paper, a weak parody of the overused phrase, “of cabbages--and kings,” from Through the looking-glass. It is part of Tweedledee’s recitation, “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Davis’s omission of credit to Carroll might give some less literate readers the incorrect impression that his title is, as the White Knight in the same book often announced, “…my own invention.” Some fanatical ethicist, more critical than Davis and determined to find misconduct everywhere, might take the utterly ridiculous position that Davis’s failure to acknowledge the source of his title is, in Davis’s words, “as bad as much plagiarism.” Less substantiated charges than this have been made.

Davis may have taken his title from this poem because the discussion of it by Tweedledee and Tweedledum leads to Alice’s puzzlement over the traditional ethical dilemma of whether people should be judged on the basis of their acts or their intentions.

Davis calls his study a description of a failure of accountability in research and says it is “a failure suggesting a need to enlarge even more than we have in recent years procedures for maintaining such accountability.” His study is no such thing, being no more than an attempt to sensationalize a trivial disagreement about editorial judgement and policy by calling it a serious case of academic wrongdoing.

Reviewer:  Eric A. Weiss Review #: CR124431 (9502-0119)
1) Van Sinderen, A. W. Babbage’s letter to Quetelet, May 1835. Ann. Hist. Comput. 5, 3 (July 1983), 263–267.
2) Berg, H. On locating the Babbage-Quetelet letter. Ann. Hist. Comput. 14, 1 (1992), 7–8.
3) Campbell-Kelly, M. (Ed.) The works of Charles Babbage. New York University Press, 1989.
4) Dodgson, C. L. [Lewis Carroll]. Alice’s adventures under ground (The mouse’s tale). Oxford, 1863.
5) Carroll, L. [C. L. Dodgson]. Through the looking-glass and what Alice found there. Macmillan, London, 1871.
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