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U.S. History 1877-Present 1: Searching for Sources 130 Views
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Description:
And for the next tool on our historian's tool belt, internet search engines. Oooh, ahhhhh. This thing's getting more and more like Batman's utility belt every day.
Transcript
- 00:04
The internet is awesome. We think so too. But of course, we would [People flying on a plane]
- 00:09
say that. Besides bringing the magic of shmoop to the world. The internet also
- 00:13
brings the magic of historical sources to your desktop. Well the next tool in our [Examples of historical figures appear]
- 00:18
historian tool belt, helps us to find all those sources on the web. What is this
- 00:22
magic tool? Well Google and other digital search engines, duh. It's true
Full Transcript
- 00:26
Google is good for more than finding cat videos and pirated movie. Uh we mean [Cat making shocked face]
- 00:30
pirate movies not pirated. Stay in school, yeah don't smoke. We can also find tons [woman watching TV]
- 00:36
of real deal primary and secondary historical sources. Maybe we've googled a
- 00:40
few hundred facts to prove our friends wrong, or read a ton of wiki, or better
- 00:45
yet Shmoop. Shmoop pages, you know the night before a test. But that's nowhere
- 00:48
near the full an awesome power of the internet. With digital research skills we [Man talking on a telephone]
- 00:52
can easily find those sources, we need to make the perfect, historical argument.
- 00:55
Let's rewind academic history for a second, imagine the year is 1990, Stone
- 01:00
Age. How would we research a history paper without googling. Google wasn't
- 01:05
around back then. Or diagnose ourselves with ulcers and, or stomach cancer [man looking on computer]
- 01:09
without WebMD. Well we'd have to go to an actual, physical library, use the Dewey
- 01:14
Decimal System, to find a topic, or look through the card catalog and then gather [Catalog of cards appear]
- 01:18
a bunch of books, sit down and read them. Oh shudder. Today we've got things like
- 01:23
Google and the internet, archive, project gutenberg and gazillion different
- 01:26
academic search engines and library databases. All these tools have made [computer lab at a school]
- 01:30
research far more efficient, but not necessarily easier. The internets a vast
- 01:34
sea of information, larger than any single library has ever been and finding [Man reading on PC]
- 01:39
the information we're looking for can be like finding a needle in a haystack, or a
- 01:43
needle in a haystack floating through the endless expanse of outer space. Most [Needle in a haystack in outer space and it explodes]
- 01:47
people have done a google search at some point, right like this morning. Unless
- 01:51
their the type to think the government is using a laptop microwave to read our [man with tinfoil hat running in room]
- 01:54
minds. Even the more sane of us, might not know how to hone our Google searches to
- 01:58
razor-sharp precision. The key to this is boolean logic, that sounds like something
- 02:03
from Doctor Who. You know, doctor, the Booleans, are attacking. But it actually refers to the [Booleans attacking man in space]
- 02:07
way we talk, to search engines. Like when we type in Little Bighorn and
- 02:12
Wounded Knee, well the engine is going to search for sources that mention both [picture of battle at Little Bighorn]
- 02:17
things. But if we type in Little Bighorn or wounded knee, the engine would also
- 02:22
include sources that only mention one or the other. Like think about it, if you typed in
- 02:26
Wounded Knee, well you'd probably get a lot of web MD things about, running [Images of knee bones]
- 02:30
and Nike shoes, you know an advertisements probably pop up offering us Band-Aids.
- 02:35
They'd be off base. Anyways using the word, not, is especially useful. It's a way of
- 02:40
nixing certain terms from our search results. So if we're trying to look up [Girl using laptop for hawaiian history]
- 02:44
Hawaiian history, but keep getting touristy sites in our results, we would
- 02:48
add, not, to the end of our search. Like this, Hawaii history not tourism not
- 02:54
travel not vacation. Got to be honest, we're not that into excluding the [person surfing waves]
- 02:58
vacation stuff right now, let's go with it. Anyways last of all, quotes. Quotes are [Person surfing a wave]
- 03:03
also essential, if we want to find an exact phrase. Like we wanted to find the
- 03:07
phrase, Abraham Lincoln in a bikini, we'd slap quotes all around it and yep we
- 03:12
actually matches when we Google that. Try it. Worship the power of the internet. [Lincoln Memorial]
- 03:15
It's worthy, it's worthy.
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