ShmoopTube
Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.
Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos
U.S. History 1877-Present 1: Searching for Sources 132 Views
Share It!
Description:
And for the next tool on our historian's tool belt, internet search engines. Oooh, ahhhhh. This thing's getting more and more like Batman's utility belt every day.
Transcript
- 00:04
The internet is awesome. We think so too. But of course, we would [People flying on a plane]
- 00:09
say that. Besides bringing the magic of shmoop to the world. The internet also
- 00:13
brings the magic of historical sources to your desktop. Well the next tool in our [Examples of historical figures appear]
- 00:18
historian tool belt, helps us to find all those sources on the web. What is this
- 00:22
magic tool? Well Google and other digital search engines, duh. It's true
Full Transcript
- 00:26
Google is good for more than finding cat videos and pirated movie. Uh we mean [Cat making shocked face]
- 00:30
pirate movies not pirated. Stay in school, yeah don't smoke. We can also find tons [woman watching TV]
- 00:36
of real deal primary and secondary historical sources. Maybe we've googled a
- 00:40
few hundred facts to prove our friends wrong, or read a ton of wiki, or better
- 00:45
yet Shmoop. Shmoop pages, you know the night before a test. But that's nowhere
- 00:48
near the full an awesome power of the internet. With digital research skills we [Man talking on a telephone]
- 00:52
can easily find those sources, we need to make the perfect, historical argument.
- 00:55
Let's rewind academic history for a second, imagine the year is 1990, Stone
- 01:00
Age. How would we research a history paper without googling. Google wasn't
- 01:05
around back then. Or diagnose ourselves with ulcers and, or stomach cancer [man looking on computer]
- 01:09
without WebMD. Well we'd have to go to an actual, physical library, use the Dewey
- 01:14
Decimal System, to find a topic, or look through the card catalog and then gather [Catalog of cards appear]
- 01:18
a bunch of books, sit down and read them. Oh shudder. Today we've got things like
- 01:23
Google and the internet, archive, project gutenberg and gazillion different
- 01:26
academic search engines and library databases. All these tools have made [computer lab at a school]
- 01:30
research far more efficient, but not necessarily easier. The internets a vast
- 01:34
sea of information, larger than any single library has ever been and finding [Man reading on PC]
- 01:39
the information we're looking for can be like finding a needle in a haystack, or a
- 01:43
needle in a haystack floating through the endless expanse of outer space. Most [Needle in a haystack in outer space and it explodes]
- 01:47
people have done a google search at some point, right like this morning. Unless
- 01:51
their the type to think the government is using a laptop microwave to read our [man with tinfoil hat running in room]
- 01:54
minds. Even the more sane of us, might not know how to hone our Google searches to
- 01:58
razor-sharp precision. The key to this is boolean logic, that sounds like something
- 02:03
from Doctor Who. You know, doctor, the Booleans, are attacking. But it actually refers to the [Booleans attacking man in space]
- 02:07
way we talk, to search engines. Like when we type in Little Bighorn and
- 02:12
Wounded Knee, well the engine is going to search for sources that mention both [picture of battle at Little Bighorn]
- 02:17
things. But if we type in Little Bighorn or wounded knee, the engine would also
- 02:22
include sources that only mention one or the other. Like think about it, if you typed in
- 02:26
Wounded Knee, well you'd probably get a lot of web MD things about, running [Images of knee bones]
- 02:30
and Nike shoes, you know an advertisements probably pop up offering us Band-Aids.
- 02:35
They'd be off base. Anyways using the word, not, is especially useful. It's a way of
- 02:40
nixing certain terms from our search results. So if we're trying to look up [Girl using laptop for hawaiian history]
- 02:44
Hawaiian history, but keep getting touristy sites in our results, we would
- 02:48
add, not, to the end of our search. Like this, Hawaii history not tourism not
- 02:54
travel not vacation. Got to be honest, we're not that into excluding the [person surfing waves]
- 02:58
vacation stuff right now, let's go with it. Anyways last of all, quotes. Quotes are [Person surfing a wave]
- 03:03
also essential, if we want to find an exact phrase. Like we wanted to find the
- 03:07
phrase, Abraham Lincoln in a bikini, we'd slap quotes all around it and yep we
- 03:12
actually matches when we Google that. Try it. Worship the power of the internet. [Lincoln Memorial]
- 03:15
It's worthy, it's worthy.
Up Next
Ever heard of a "living document"? They eat and breathe just like the rest of us! They even walk around on their own two legs. Okay, fine—maybe t...
Related Videos
If the Puritans had gotten their way, religion would play a much larger role in lawmaking these days. Want to know more? Watch the video for all th...
What happened between the creation of the Articles of Confederation and the ratification of the current U.S. Constitution? This video analyzes the...
The Modernists thought the world had a lot of problems, and they were intent on fixing them—or at least talking about fixing them. Unfortunately,...
This video explains Federalism and the quest for a fair balance between state and national power. It covers the progression and compromises of Fede...