H9808A 2009 04 Search

Return to UWO History 9808A Digital History Fall 2009

Many search engines work by creating indexes for full text, data structures that pinpoint the location of almost every word. While generally very useful, this has the consequence of increasing the number of irrelevant items in search results. ("Radisson," for example, can refer to the explorer, a hotel and resort chain, towns in Quebec and Saskatchewan, and so on.) Web searches are typically done once to find something in particular. If you want to continually monitor the arrival of new information on the web, you should use an information trapping strategy instead. In information trapping, web searches are run repeatedly, and the results aggregated as RSS feeds in a feed reader. This week we discuss the dynamic nature of libraries, texts, and audiences online, and some of the tools we can use to stay on top of the changes.

• "Information Trapping - An Interview with Tara Calishain," Future Perfect Publishing (3 Sep 2007).
  

• Bradley,"Search Engines: Where We Were, Are Now, and Will Ever Be," Ariadne Magazine 47 (Apr 2006).
  

• Cohen, "The Single Box Humanities Search," dancohen.org (17 Apr 2006).
  

• Courant, "Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their kin) in the World of Google," First Monday 11, no. 8 (2006).
  

• Crane and Jones, "Text, Information, Knowledge and the Evolving Record of Humanity," D-Lib Magazine 12, no. 3 (Mar 2006).
  

• Cutts, "How Does Google Collect and Rank Results?" Google Librarian Center Newsletter (19 Dec 2005).
  

• Cutts, "How Does Google Determine Which Websites are the Most ‘Trusted’?" Google Librarian Center Newsletter (19 Jan 2006).
  

• Gralla, "Ch 27 How Internet Searching Works (Ch 31 7th ed.)", "Ch 28 How Google Works (not in 7th ed.)", "Ch 31 How Telnet Works (Ch 29 7th ed.)", "Ch 32 How FTP Works (Ch 30 7th ed.)"
  

• Grant, "Google Book Search: An Introduction," Google Librarian Center Newsletter (21 Jun 2006).
  

• Singel, "Cool Search Engines that are not Google," Wired (30 Jun 2009).
  

• Turoczy, "Reveal Yourself: Versionista Exposes Edits for Any Site," ReadWriteWeb (25 Jan 2009).

• Historia i Media, "Find paths to the digital history news."
  

• Yahoo Pipes
  

• Sadun, "Yahoo Pipes: Getting Started with Custom RSS Feeds," Ars Technica (23 Mar 2009).
  

• Yahoo Pipes, "Learn how to build a pipe in just a few minutes"
  

• Versionista

Create a basic professional webpage. For this assignment you are going to create a simple webpage to publicize yourself and your research / public history interests. There are a number of ways that you can do this without learning any new technical skills. At Google Sites, for example, you can create quite a sophisticated website without using any HTML at all. Tools like Dreamweaver or FrontPage will create HTML for you, which you can then upload to a web server. This convenience comes at a price. The automatically generated code is often baroque, and, since you didn't know how to create it in the first place, you aren't going to have much hope of maintaining it or fixing bugs. So we're going to go old school instead. Start by working through the W3 Schools HTML tutorial. When you are finished, create a new index.html file and include the following information, marked up in a way that appeals to you:

• Name
  

• Contact information
  

• Link to your blog
  

• Link to your Twitter feed
  

• Previous experience
  

• Related skills, accomplishments, publications, etc.
  

• Research and/or public history interests
  

• Useful or related links
  

• Optional: a photograph (make sure to include a thumbnail of the same image)

As long as the information is all there, don't worry too much about layout or style. You will fix those in a future assignment. When your page is complete, e-mail the .html file (and optional pictures) to me.