Information travels so fast these days that it’s hard to keep track of where it came from. Technology makes plagiarism and deception a snap. Online text can be copied and pasted in seconds, photos can be manipulated and no one may be the wiser. But thanks to technology, problems are also easier to detect.
If you think your written work has been lifted or if you’re concerned that you might have copied something without attribution, you can use DupliChecker, which searches for blocks of text. [So can your editor or professor!] Copyscape is a useful tool for Web publishers–it searches for copies of entire Web pages online. If you’ve written something that you want to keep from being lifted, you could set up a Google Alert for specific phrases.
Images have always been trickier to track. TinEye is a reverse image search that checks for duplicates online. You can plug in the URL for an image or a page containing an image, or you can upload your own image to see if it’s been used elsewhere. Now, Google has gotten into the act with its new image search function that allows for drag-and-drop.
The Google Search mobile app also allows for image searching as well as voice searches–very cool. Hat tip to Paul Bradshaw for his post about Google image search on his Online Journalism Blog. As he points out, “the service should be particularly useful to journalists seeking to verify or debunk images they’re not sure about [like] the ‘dead’ Osama Bin Laden images that so many news outlets fell for.”
Any tools you’d add to the list?
