Online Research The goal of this course was to explore the many searchable databases on the web, with an eye toward academic or educational uses. One part of our final project was a journal, documenting how and where we searched, and the other part was an annotated bibliography; both of which can be found on this site.
The Journal: I began with a simple word document, where I copied and pasted my search terms and details about my results. For example:
Google Scholar
Results 1 - 10 of about 4,500 for downloadable databases. (0.08 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,600 for downloadable educationaldatabases. (0.08 seconds)
http://users.tpg.com.au/adslfrcf/rps_org/papers/firstfleet&Roleplay.pdf * added to delicious - online role play to finetune student research skills
The act of researching continued to define my field, as I played with keywords and analyzed my results, again a small sample.
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,380,000 for Academic Feminist Theory . (0.24 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,170,000 for Academic Feminist Theory Guide. (0.25 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,160,000 for American Academic Feminist Theory Guide. (0.26 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 634,000 for American Academic Feminist Theory Guide >2000. (0.51 seconds)
GOOGLEWHACKED!
Results 1 - 1 of 1 over the past 3 months for American Academic "Feminist Theory Guide" . (0.25 seconds) Tip: Try removing quotes from your search to get more results.
You can see the entire progression in the journal, attached in the spotlight box at the top of this document. Copy and pasting search terms into the journal was fairly easy, but once I started following links within documents I found and wanted to explore, I shifted to book-marking my research. I could tell, looking at the list, how I arrived at the site, and its relation to other ideas I was exploring at the time. You can view that list here.
Once I was able to identify a fairly narrow topic, I moved my search from general search engines like Google, to subscription based engines, including Proquest, J-Stor and Infotrac. I used these to retrieve articles, follow citations and identify what I determined to be the key ideas as they related to my topic.
Next, I reviewed my lists, organized it first by type (book, journal, article) then chronologically and began my reading. I put together an online annotated bibliography divided by type, using the MLA style guide for citations and including a stable URL where available (*disclaimer -this works only when you are accessing the sites from within a proxy server or an approved IP address). Although the project didn't require accompanying analytical text, I included a page for blog entries, where I could comment on my readings and make connections not appropriate within the bibliography. I also included this from a conceptual web design standpoint:
From here: next semester, I will be taking two more classes which I hope can help me build this out more. My hope is to turn the bibliographies into databases, for searching and easier categorizing, and to turn the pages themselves into a more robust content management system, possibly like a wiki.
