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In this analogy, the raging darkness of the ocean is the internet, and you're the ship. And Shmoop is the ray of light beaming down from the clouds. (Source)
You've got your research questions. They're good. They're ready to go. But now they're staring at you with big anthropomorphized eyes and demanding that you start answering them. How will you do that? Well, using the power of the internets, search engines, and your own noggin, mostly. But it turns out, shockingly (who could have known?), that the internet is chock full of lies. In this lesson, we're going to talk about the process of using search engines to get the right kinds of information.
Imagine for a second that the year is 1990. The world's first search engine has just been born. It's a tiny program named Archie, which searched through the internet's files manually, because that's how tiny the internet was. So how would you research a paper for school in 1990? You would have gone to an actual, physical library, complete with shrewish old ladies with oversized bifocals, used the Dewey decimal system to find your topic or looked through the card catalog (which was basically like Indiana Jones decoding a treasure map...except not fun, or sexy), and then gathered up a bunch of books and sat down and read them. It wasn't easy.
Today, of course, we've got things like Google, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, a gazillion different academic search engines, and library databases. All these tools have definitely made research far more efficient, but it's a dangerous mistake to imagine that they make research easier. The internet is a vast sea of information, larger than any single library has ever been, and finding the information you're looking for is a serious challenge. Grab your oilskins, sailors.
A+ SEARCHING
A+ SEARCHING
BOOLEAN SEARCHING
Unless you've been stranded on a desert island for the last thirty years, or you're the kind of crazy old person that thinks the government is using laptop-microwaves to read your mind, then you're probably familiar with Google. It's one of the basic ways that most people use the internet, and it's changed the way we get answers, frame questions, and write hilarious comics.
But, like I've been saying, it's also not as simple and easy to use as you might think it is. First, you've got to phrase your search in a way that's likely to get good results. So, our example research questions from last time went like this: How did the British Empire affect the natural environment over time? Was the British Empire environmentally detrimental, or helpful? What were the major natural resources that the growth of the Empire consumed?
How would we search for answers? Would we just stick the whole question in the search bar and hope for the best? Or grab some keywords and start more generally? Here's what those two searches get you:
The first search gets you a top result from Wikipedia—not a reliable resource (crowd-sourced sources are kind of sketchy), but it's pretty predictable. Then there's more Wikipedia, and some discussion threads from an academic group called H-Net. It's a …B- kind of search (Note: If you're feeling a little uncertain about simple searches and Google, here's a good, basic introduction).
The second search starts with a historiographical academic article on recent research on the environmental history of the British Empire. Bingo. Then there's an Oxford companion book on the same subject, another historiographical essay, and only then do we hit Wiki. I'd give that an A-.
So how do we make these searches into A+ searches? By figuring out how search engines work and what kinds of operators they use. No, not the kind of operators that transferred calls in the 1950s—the kind that tells the search engine how to search.
The first thing we need to talk about is Boolean logic. That sounds like something from Star Trek (Captain, the Booleans are attacking!), but it's actually a mathematical concept that forms the backbone of most decent search engines. Basically, it allows you to link together your search terms in particular ways, using mathematically-important short words. Note that Google has weird individual rules, so most of the information below applies to library searches or academic search engines.
Here are the rules, with lovely examples:
AND. When you stick AND in the middle of a search, it tells the search engine you want only results that have this word AND this word. In Google, a simple blank space is assumed to mean AND, but in other search engines it would look like this:
British empire AND environment AND history
OR. OR is a way to broaden your searches. It tells the search engine that you'll take results that have this word OR this word. Like so:
environment OR nature
NOT. This is an especially useful one. It's a way of excluding certain terms from your results. So, if you were trying to look up Hawaiian history, but you kept getting touristy sites in your results, you would add NOT to the end of your search:
hawaii history NOT tourism NOT travel NOT vacation
NEAR. This one's a little more tricksy. It tells the search engine that you want your two terms to be within ten words of each other. It can help if you've got two pretty disparate terms that you're trying to stick together, like atomic physics and Christianity. Goes like this:
atomic AND physics NEAR christianity
Okay, let's pause. These are the basic concepts of Boolean searching, and it's pretty important to get the logic of them. Go to this awesome educational site and play around with terms and phrases in the Boolean search box. Try to find information on the same topic using variations of terms and operators. Feel free to copy/paste your search into Google to see some results.
Alright, more search tricks:
" ". Quotations are one of the more universal search rules. If you put several words in quotes, your search will only give you results with that specific phrase. That means you should only put logical phrases in quotes—you wouldn't expect an essay to have the line "women WWII nurses france" in it, so don't put quotes around it. Something like this would work better:
"environmental history" AND Britain AND Empire
* Ah, the lowly asterisk. This is a little symbol that works like a wildcard within a word. If you use it right, it can save you from having to run multiple searches with slight differences, like this:
natur* would return results for natural, nature, naturally, etc.
imperial* would return results for imperial, imperialism, and imperialistic.
?. The question mark works a lot like the asterisk, except there's only one letter that's wild. Like this:
wom?n finds results for women and woman.
~. Last but not least, the tilde. This is so cool. Seriously. That squiggly line indicates that you're searching for the specific term, or any of its close synonyms. Plus, it works in Google. Sometimes your searches are turning up what you need only because you're accidentally using an uncommon noun. Here's how to fix it:
british empire ~memoir would find you results with the words British Empire in them, but also synonyms for the word memoir: account, biography, autobiography, history, chronicle, record, diary, etc.
Whew! But you know how I mentioned that Google has its own rules about search operators? We're going to go over those real quick. First, spend a second reading through Google's own list of operators. Now, we'll highlight a few:
site: This one is a lifesaver, especially when you're looking for legitimate, academic sources. You can type in your source like you normally would, and then type in site:.edu to limit the search to sites that end with ".edu" (those are websites from legit academic institutions, i.e. people who know what they're talking about).
- sign. Google uses the "-" instead of NOT, but it works the same.
*. You can use the asterisk as a wild card for whole words in Google. Sweet.
USING DIGITAL SEARCHES TO GET PHYSICAL STUFF
So far in this lesson, I've been assuming that you want to use Google or other search engines to find online sources. Online sources are convenient, plentiful, and generally deserving of a froyo and/or a chorus of angels. But once you actually dig in to your research, there's going to come a time when you need print sources. Yep, I'm talking about books. You won't need them because print sources are just inherently, magically better than digital ones—it's just that not everything you need is likely to be conveniently online for you, even if a lot has made its way there by now. Smarty pants academics still publish most of their brilliant research in books or articles.
Which means libraries, my young travelers. But, luckily, the days of card catalogs are long past. And even more luckily, all your digital searching skills apply to library search engines too. Generally speaking, all the Boolean operators we talked about will work in most library systems. If you're unsure, there's often a FAQ part of the website that mentions whether or not it's a Boolean system.
This is an example of a Boolean search in a public library system. Notice that there are only 14 results, but the first one is spot on based on our search (information about nurses during World War II). You can think of libraries as curated collections of information, while the internet is just a jumble of everything all at once (or maybe it's like the difference between an art gallery and Etsy).
But you shouldn't imagine that you're limited to the print sources that happen to be locally available in your high school or public library. Most libraries have a system called "Interlibrary Loan" or ILL, which lets you borrow a book from another public institution even if it's hundreds of miles away. How do you know what books other libraries have? WorldCat. It's basically a list of everything that's ever published. Literally. Plus, it can tell you which libraries have copies of the book you're looking for. Nifty, right? Check it out below!
u-s--history-course-1-4-64FD1806E4074F62A6293E2FB127B4A8.mp4Google Sites
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