ShmoopTube

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We speak student! The internet is awesome. We think so too. But of course, we would

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say that. Besides bringing the magic of shmoop to the world. The internet also

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brings the magic of historical sources to your desktop. Well the next tool in our

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historian tool belt, helps us to find all those sources on the web. What is this

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magic tool? Well Google and other digital search engines, duh. It's true

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Google is good for more than finding cat videos and pirated movie. Uh we mean

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pirate movies not pirated. Stay in school, yeah don't smoke. We can also find tons [woman watching TV]

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of real deal primary and secondary historical sources. Maybe we've googled a

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few hundred facts to prove our friends wrong, or read a ton of wiki, or better

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yet Shmoop. Shmoop pages, you know the night before a test. But that's nowhere

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near the full an awesome power of the internet. With digital research skills we

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can easily find those sources, we need to make the perfect, historical argument.

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Let's rewind academic history for a second, imagine the year is 1990, Stone

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Age. How would we research a history paper without googling. Google wasn't

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around back then. Or diagnose ourselves with ulcers and, or stomach cancer [man looking on computer]

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without WebMD. Well we'd have to go to an actual, physical library, use the Dewey

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Decimal System, to find a topic, or look through the card catalog and then gather

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a bunch of books, sit down and read them. Oh shudder. Today we've got things like

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Google and the internet, archive, project gutenberg and gazillion different

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academic search engines and library databases. All these tools have made [computer lab at a school]

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research far more efficient, but not necessarily easier. The internets a vast

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sea of information, larger than any single library has ever been and finding

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the information we're looking for can be like finding a needle in a haystack, or a

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needle in a haystack floating through the endless expanse of outer space. Most

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people have done a google search at some point, right like this morning. Unless

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their the type to think the government is using a laptop microwave to read our [man with tinfoil hat running in room]

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minds. Even the more sane of us, might not know how to hone our Google searches to

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razor-sharp precision. The key to this is boolean logic, that sounds like something

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from Doctor Who. You know, doctor, the Booleans, are attacking. But it actually refers to the

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way we talk, to search engines. Like when we type in Little Bighorn and

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Wounded Knee, well the engine is going to search for sources that mention both [picture of battle at Little Bighorn]

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things. But if we type in Little Bighorn or wounded knee, the engine would also

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include sources that only mention one or the other. Like think about it, if you typed in

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Wounded Knee, well you'd probably get a lot of web MD things about, running

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and Nike shoes, you know an advertisements probably pop up offering us Band-Aids.

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They'd be off base. Anyways using the word, not, is especially useful. It's a way of

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nixing certain terms from our search results. So if we're trying to look up

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Hawaiian history, but keep getting touristy sites in our results, we would

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add, not, to the end of our search. Like this, Hawaii history not tourism not

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travel not vacation. Got to be honest, we're not that into excluding the [person surfing waves]

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vacation stuff right now, let's go with it. Anyways last of all, quotes. Quotes are

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also essential, if we want to find an exact phrase. Like we wanted to find the

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phrase, Abraham Lincoln in a bikini, we'd slap quotes all around it and yep we

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actually matches when we Google that. Try it. Worship the power of the internet. [Lincoln Memorial]

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It's worthy, it's worthy.

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