Information+Literacy

The internet provides you with a wealth of information at your finger tips. Learning to figure out how to get the stuff you want and limit the stuff you don't want takes practice. Knowing where to look for the information as well as being able to analyze its quality is also an important step.

When working with online sources of information, you can ask yourself some questions about the material you find, to help you evaluate and think critically about your sources. When you find a website or a source of information, ask yourself some questions. Who authors the site? Can you learn about the author or company that hosts the website? Does the site contain links to other sites? How reliable are these sites? What are the author’s biases about your topic? How can you tell? Does the author use inflammatory language? How accurate is the information on the site? While you may not always have enough knowledge about a topic to know right away if the information is correct, do some research on the author’s facts and claims. Does the author support claims with reliable sources? Can you verify their research through another source? Is there advertising on the site? What can this say about the website and the people who created it? How timely is the information on the site? If you are looking for current research, make sure that the site is updated regularly.

=Search Engine Modifiers= Last week we worked with Google operators, (site:, double quotes, minus sign,) to help narrow searches. When you do a search in Google you will get the sites that have the most external links to them. Not necessarily the best result for your search.

Alta Vista is another search engine and also has operators to help narrow information that you receive from your search results:
 * **host:**//hostname// || Finds pages on a specific computer. The search **host:www.shopping.com** would find pages on the Shopping.com computer, and **host:dilbert.unitedmedia.com** would find pages on the computer called dilbert at unitedmedia.com. ||
 * **link:**//URLtext// || Finds pages with a link to a page with the specified URL text. Use **link:www.myway.com** to find all pages linking to myway.com. ||
 * **title:**//text// || Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). The search **title:sunset** would find pages with sunset in the title. ||
 * **inurl:**//text// || Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL. Use **inurl:garden** to find all pages on all servers that have the word //garden// anywhere in the host name, path, or file name. ||  ||

=Why look at External Links?=

External links are like digital threads that come from other sites. They may be made by anyone in the world. Any author can choose to link to a document; an author may even choose to link to his/her own work. External links are invisible. Unlike forward links, which are controlled by a web site author, anyone in the world can create a link to a web site from an external source. There are no link police! Examining a web site's external links is an important step in validating Internet information. In validating, ask three questions:
 * 1) Who is linked to the web site? Look to see what other groups or individuals have linked to the site. Are they universities, schools or commercial sites? Read the URLs and titles of external links carefully. Look to see if there is a pattern in the types of sites linked.
 * 2) What is the purpose of the link? Why have groups or individuals chosen to link to this site? Web authors choose to link to other sites for specific purposes. Speculate on what those purposes might be.
 * 3) What do other sites say about the information on the site? Gain perspective about a web site by reading what another site tells you about it. Cross-reference information and look for hidden bias.

=Domain Name Game, (an example of being taken in by the .edu )= A student submitted his research paper to the history teacher on WWII. In it the student claimed the holocaust was an elaborate fabrication. When the teacher examined the student's work cited list she then asked the student to describe the reasoning for choosing the sites they had. She said she had used the first site to provided the bulk of her information "The website was good because it has .edu." The student thought she was using a paper, from a professor at a well known college, which had provided legitimacy to her own research.

What she had no way of knowing, from her initial research, was the the author of the paper was indeed a professor at Northwestern University, but his expertise was in electrical engineering, not history. The student had come across the professor's personal website containing holocaust revisionist content, but had made the assumption in thinking that the content was verifiable, data driven information when it was purely personal opinion.

You may or may not recognize the domain name or extension of a URL. Keep reading past the first forward slash / for more clues. If you are on a personal page the information you are reading may or may not be trustworthy.

A personal page is a web site created by an individual. The web site may contain useful information, links to important resources and helpful facts, but sometimes these pages offer highly biased opinions.

The presence of a name in the URL such as jdoe and a tilde ~ or % or the word "users" or "people" or "members" frequently means you are on a personal web site. Even if a site has the extension, .edu, you still need to keep a look out for personal pages. Case in point is this web site previously available and published by a professor at Northwestern University: http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html

This site is a Holocaust Revisionist site that argues that the Holocaust did not take place. Although this site contains a domain name we should be able to trust northwestern.edu, the tilde ~ followed by someone's name, abutz tell us that this is a personal posting and not an official Northwestern page.

To use Professor Butz's site, you will be directed to an archived address of the original site: http://web.archive.org/web/20041012180151/pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html
 * Today, Professor Butz's site, describing the holocaust as an historic myth is no longer available at the original address. In fact, when you type in the address a screen from Northwestern appears that says the site is no longer available. The message is only accurate in part. The site is no longer available at the original address but it is available if you know how to research the history of a website with a special tool called the Wayback Machine.

Notice the second half of this URL. You'll see that this second half shows the actual former address of the site.



=Find the publisher, (or Who is responsible for this information)=

It is sometimes helpful to know who publishes the information you are reading, but it is not always easy to find and some authors are purposely deceptive. www.easywhois.com

Also remember to look at what the site offers you for information: contact names, "About" pages, disclaimers. Always scroll to the bottom of the page and look for the information the authors give you.

Information for this page was gotten from http://novemberlearning.com/resources/information-literacy-resources