Using
the Internet as a journalistic resource By Shawn Lin
Media
Credit: Joe
Piniero
Sreenath
Sreenivasan, an associate professor of
journalism at Columbia´s Graduate School of
Journalism, shares his expertise with editors
and advisers at the Summer Journalism
Workshop.
"Has anyone seen this?" Sreenath
Sreenivasan asked as he brought up a web page on his
laptop.
The page, entitled "Reactions of Felines
to Bearded Men," is a research report, complete with
data, analysis, and names of researchers from major
universities. The page looked credible, but it's a
hoax.
Sreenivasan, an associate professor of
Journalism at Columbia University, spoke Friday, June
29, to members of the Newspaper Management course at the
summer workshop about using the Internet for in-depth
research.
"The web is not the way the press
portrays it," Sreenivasan said. "They portray the web
as containing three things: NeoNazis, child pornography
and scammers. But the vast majority of websites are full
of information that is entertaining and fun."
For
someone who has not done much research on the Internet,
it can be an intimidating and confusing place, with
millions of articles, links to pages that don't exist
and enough conjecture to fill a library of
books.
The sheer volume of content on the
Internet is its most valuable asset and its most
daunting obstacle. Sifting through this avalanche of
information is the key to productive research,
Sreenivasan said.
Search
engines
"Search engines are the most
frustrating things on the Internet because they don't
live up to their name," Sreenivasan said.
Using
search engines exclusively to search for information can
cause many headaches. Results are often inaccurate and
misleading, he said. It doesn't help that some websites
pay search engines to give them the top position. Of the
countless number of search engines on the Internet,
which ones really work?
Sreenivasan recommended
the Google search engine (http://www.google.com/). It is one of the
most powerful search engines on the net because of the
method by which it ranks web pages. Instead of ranking
merely by "hits," the number of visits to the website,
Google ranks also by "link popularity," Sreenivasan
said.
Link popularity assumes that a web page
with useful content will have many other websites
linking to it. More pages linking to the web page will
result in a higher rank in the Google search engine. On
the other hand, if the web page does not provide much
content, fewer people will want to link to the web page,
and it will rank much lower. This system puts websites
on a qualitative measuring stick instead of the
quantitative one used by other search
engines.
Another way to improve the chances of
finding what you need is to learn the advanced functions
of your favorite search engine, Sreenivasan said. For
example, using Google, if you were looking for a
chocolate chip cookie recipe, but you only wanted to
search on cooking.com, you would type in the Google
search engine: chocolate chip cookie recipe
site:cooking.com.
The "site:" phrase instructs
the Google search engine to search for chocolate chip
cookie recipes within the cooking.com Web site. This
type of tool is just one of the many to be found on the
help pages of virtually any engine, Screenivasan
said.
Although search engines are getting better,
every day millions of web pages are added and search
engines simply cannot keep up, he said. Even within the
material search engines have cataloged, there are still
limitations to their ability to find keywords and match
them to your search query.
Finding general
information on a topic is easy, but delving deeper into
the subject matter may require more than a search
engine, Sreenivasan said.
There is a multitude of
reference sites on the Internet devoted entirely to a
specific topic: population, legal terms, maps, unit
conversion, translation and even moon phase on any
given day in the next 2000 years. But the chances of
stumbling across such a web page in every day browsing
are slim.
Research portals
A
solution? Research portals, a large collective of
information-oriented websites all linked from one
page, Screenivasan said.
Refdesk (http://www.refdesk.com/) is one such
research portal. On the front page, there are links to
maps, legal/medical/scientific dictionaries,
encyclopedias, statistics, newspapers, magazines and
nearly anything else on a topic of
interest.
These portals are a good basis for
projects because they contain so much information
concentrated in an organized, easy to use page,
Sreenivasan said.
Web
directories
Similar to research portals are
web directories, Sreenivasan said. People sometimes
refer to web directories as the Yellow Pages of the
Internet. Web directories start with broad categories,
such as sports, and become more specific as you descend
through the hierarchy of sub-categories. Human
assessment is the primary difference between a search
engine and a web directory. Search engines use computers
to find and rank web pages. But human beings have found
and ranked pages in web directories. This method of
ranking allows researchers to visit pages that others
have found useful.
Another benefit of a web
directory is its ability to show many spin-offs
of one topic.
For example, descending into the
Space category of the Yahoo.com directory, you can find
web pages on space medicine, microgravity, and other
topics you might not have thought to search for. Of
course, no search engine or web page can absolutely
guarantee the validity of its data, but the more sources
you can gather, the better the chances that the data you
collected is accurate.
Shawn Lin is a
co-editor in chief of the Warrior's Word, the newspaper
of Wausau West High School in Wausau, Wisc.
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