Knowing Things
One of the blessings, and curses, of the Net is the access it gives to information. Properly harnessed, it’s a great research tool, as many traditional sources of information are easily accessible while millions of everyday people record their own contributions to humanity’s collective knowledge. (Indeed, David Brin has argued in The Transparent Society that in an upcoming “Century of Aficionados,� the effect of “armies of individuals pursuing their own private, passionate interests� will ensure that “almost nothing of recognized value that is now known about the human past or present will ever again be lost.�) The trick is in using those tools effectively. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about that over the years, so I thought I’d discuss some of the sources I’ve found most effective.
While I know they’re far from perfect, I still rely on the conventional press for a lot of my information; the Internet just makes it easier to collect all the pieces. I check in with Philadelphia’s two major daily papers pretty much every day, and some combination of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the New York Daily News on close to a weekly basis, if not more. News channels like CNN and MSNBC have their own sites; MSNBC republishes content from the Post and Newsweek, while CNN connects with fellow Time Warner publications like Time and Money. The wire services that feed stories to these sites also provide their content to online portals like Yahoo!; I have my home page customized to give me AP and Reuters headlines in news, sports, politics, entertainment, science, and other subjects. The AP’s website doesn’t provide much content, but Reuters’ U.S. and British pages are both good resources.
There are other amalgamations of news, some more formal than others. Google has a news section that collects many recently published stories and lets you limit your searches to content from the affiliated sources. Many personal websites, message boards, and blogs provide a healthy dose of links to interesting stories. (I’m fond of the Delphi forum The New Medievalism, for example.) Once you hit that level of the web, however, you run into the promise and the pitfall offered by a medium that offers relatively easy access to a global audience. Information is available from a great many more sources, and the ability of a few outlets to highlight or neglect specific items is lessened. But with so many sources, and less of a traditional bottleneck, it’s a lot harder to separate reliable information from conjecture, misinterpretations, gossip and flat-out bad info. I know that while I do my best to fact check the essays I write for this site, on the forums and on other message boards I tend to be more conversational and a little more casual. So there’s a certain degree of skepticism that needs to be brought to bear. But while the Web can create a lot of misinformation, it also does a lot to aid fact checkers.
Here again, Google is a tremendous help. Not only is it a good overall search engine for just finding websites, its News search lets me find out if a particular topic is getting a significant amount of media coverage. The Google Groups search expands my reach from just the Web to almost 20 years of Usenet postings. I rarely use Usenet as a final authority, but it often provides me with snippets I can use for further checks. The Advanced Search functions of the main search engine are a great tool for those checks. You read somewhere that someone made some kind of incendiary statement? Use the exact phrase option to see if the quote was reported anywhere, and what the context was. (I’ve also found this a useful tool when I get a snippet of lyrics to an unknown song stuck in my head.) Recall reading an article on a particular site about an important topic, but can’t find it now? Cut through the muck by searching within a particular domain.
Another, somewhat quirkier search possibility is Amazon’s Book Search. They recently altered the book search (and only the book search) so that rather than search merely for keywords in the title or author fields, Amazon finds your search text within the text of books itself. This can be hugely annoying when you’re just looking for a book title, and makes the Advanced Search function a must. But being able to pull up at least excerpts from many texts is a useful tool. Once or twice, I’ve saved myself trips to the library by being able to pull up an important article or chapter with the Look Inside This Book tool.
There’s no substitute for finding reliable sources, though. Preferably, sources that will provide at least a little bit of a sourcing trail for those who might want to try and find out for themselves. While the comment sections of blogs can get dicey, I like the journals maintained by someone with some degree of expertise in a particular field. Washington reporter Joshua Mich Marshall’s Talking Points Memo is one such resource; not only does he have good insight and reporting of his own to offer, he often provides pointers to the raw transcripts and documents that are stored by government agencies on the web. (Those archives are treasure troves of information in their own right.) Juan Cole, a professor who’s been called upon by networks like CNN as a Middle East expert, has been providing a detailed running analysis and commentary on his blog, Informed Consent. I’ve also taken to reading the Urban Legends Resource Page from time to time; the debunkers there are usually good about citing sources for their explanations. And newspaper columnist Cecil Adams has an archive of his informative and entertaining Straight Dope columns available, for those times when you’re wondering “Just what the heck is ‘Hotel California’ supposed to be about, anyway?�
Finally, there are the research databases like Lexis Nexis and JSTOR, which are extremely comprehensive databases of publications including the popular press and academic journals. These databases charge hefty subscription fees, but most libraries offer access to them. And if you’re affiliated with an educational institution at all, you might be able to hook into the databases from your home PCs via their networks. Now that’s a handy thing to have around for those 3 AM research runs.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.