Research Online
RESEARCHING ANTHROPOLOGY
ON THE INTERNET
David
L. Carlson
Anthropology
Department
Texas A&M
University
Table of Contents
Part I. Guide to Using the Internet
Part II. Researching Anthropology on the Web
This guide is written for students who are generally familiar with the World Wide Web and the Internet, but do not have much experience using the web to study anthropology. Part I of the guide provides you with the answers to some simple questions about the Internet and the World Wide Web. Basic tasks such as communicating, searching, and learning are covered in some detail with a focus on how to use the Internet to place the study of anthropology into a broader context. Addresses for the web sites mentioned in the text are included at the end of each section. Part II focuses in more detail on parts of the World Wide Web that cover anthropology. Cultural anthropology (including linguistics), physical anthropology, archaeology, and applied anthropology are all discussed. Within each of these fields, specific web sites that are good starting points are identified. In addition, there are sections on applying anthropology (as a volunteer, field school participant, or intern) and how to find a job in anthropology.
If you are a student, this guide can help you to prepare for class and complete course assignments. The Internet is not a replacement for using the resources in your school library, but it can help you to find those resources more effectively. It can also help you find material that is not locally available. You can use the Internet to keep up to date on current news reports that cover areas of the world or topics that are covered in your textbook or in class lectures. That information can help you to be a better student in several ways. You will be able to ask better questions in class and you will remember things better if you link what you are learning in the classroom to what is going on in the world around you. You will also develop better skills as a critical thinker, because you will find many competing viewpoints on the web. Evaluating these sites will strengthen your ability to evaluate arguments and compare contrasting views.
If you are an anthropology instructor, you may be looking for ways to incorporate this guide into your course. There are at least eight ways you can use the information in this guide to create classroom assignments.
These are just some starting points for incorporating the Internet into your anthropology classes. As you and your students become more familiar with the web, you will certainly find other interesting ways to integrate the web into your classes. As you do, I would very much like to hear about them.
David L. Carlson
Texas A&M University
PART
I.
GUIDE TO USING THE INTERNET
You probably already use the Internet. It is mentioned on the news and in newspapers and magazines every day. It is either the greatest boon to modern civilization or the greatest curse. As a student of anthropology, you probably have an opinion on this debate. This guide does not attempt to resolve that issue, but it does provide you with basic information concerning what is available on the Internet and how you find it. Once you know how to locate information, you will be able to find out more about any of the topics discussed here. If you know little about the Internet, this guide is your first step. If you are already an experienced net surfer, this guide may give you some new ideas about how to use the web to enhance your education. The Internet does not render traditional methods of communication and education obsolete; instead it supplements and amplifies them. In order to use the net you will need to develop new skills and refine ones that you already have.
The Internet (or just "net") is a "network of networks." It is a standard method by which computers can communicate with one another regardless of whether they are large or small computers and regardless of the operating system they use. It is a kind of universal language for computers. At first the primary use of the net was for electronic mail, transferring files, and operating computers remotely. More recently, additional functions have been added to make it easier to exchange information and ideas over the net. The most important of these is a way of transferring pages of information containing text, multimedia, and links to other pages. These hypertext pages are retrieved and displayed by programs called "browsers." Collectively, these pages make up the part of the Internet called the "World Wide Web" (or just "web"). Although the Net refers to the interconnected networks and the Web refers to the interlinked hypertext pages, most people do not distinguish between the two consistently. In this guide I will use the terms interchangeably.
A reasonable way of visualizing the Internet is to think of a series of nodes (computers or whole computer networks) that are connected to one another. Each node is connected to only a few other nodes so getting information from one node to another one means that the information travels through many other nodes before reaching its destination. This roundabout approach makes it simpler to add a new node since only a few connections need to be added and it also means that information has many different paths that it could take in getting from one node to another. If one path is broken, the information is just rerouted along another set of paths. The network does not care what kind of information is being moved. It could be an email file, a picture, a sound file, or a video.
The guide is divided into two sections. The first part answers "Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQs) about the Internet and the World Wide Web and describes how you can use the net as a student. The addresses of the web sites (the Universal Resource Locators or URLs) are listed at the end of each section. The second part of the guide focuses specifically on how to use the net to enhance your understanding of anthropology and provides useful information for researching specific topics within the fields of cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology, applied anthropology, volunteer opportunities in anthropology, and careers in anthropology
Where did the Internet come from? The history of the Internet and the World Wide Web is interesting because it developed from a few simple requirements for a robust network. It grew amazingly fast into a global information network linking millions of people and millions of pages together.
What do I need to get on the Net? This short section gives you some pointers to getting started on the web. Since there are differences in computers, software, and methods of connecting to the Net, it may not meet your exact needs, but it should help you to ask knowledgeable questions.
What kinds of information will I find on the Web? This section talks about the different kinds of files on the Web. Some can be viewed directly with your browser software (probably Netscape or Internet Explorer), but others require special programs. The file types and the special programs you may need are summarized here.
Is it safe? News media enjoy running stories on the dangers of the Net. This section provides a brief introduction to potential hazards on the Net including viruses, cookies, java programs, and communicating with strangers.
Is the information on the Net reliable? The simple answer is, "Some of it." This chapter gives you some basic tools to help you develop critical skills. Just as you cannot believe everything people tell you and you cannot believe everything you read in the paper, you cannot believe everything you read or see on the Web.
Where should I start? When you connect to the Net and start your browser, a start page is loaded. This section talks about start pages and portals. If you just want to explore the Web, you might try one of the Web Rings that links sites related to anthropology or the Virtual Library of Anthropology.
Where Did the Internet Come From?
The Internet was born thirty years ago in the midst of the Cold War. With the increasing threat of nuclear destruction, the U.S. military wanted to be able to operate computers remotely and wanted to be able to communicate over its computer network even if large parts of it were destroyed. This meant that the network had to be decentralized and it had to be possible to route information dynamically. Out of these requirements ARPANET began in 1969 with four nodes. It grew slowly at first. Nodes were added and at each node additional computers (hosts) were connected. By 1984 there were 1,000 hosts, by 1989 there were 100,000 and by 1992 there were 1,000,000. Today there are about 72 million hosts.
One of the important reasons for connecting computers was to allow people to access them remotely. Powerful computers were expensive and it was easier and less expensive to let researchers run programs on those computers remotely. Communication between people at the various nodes to ask for assistance or schedule time on a computer took the form of electronic messages (which were much cheaper than phone calls). As the net grew and the cost of computers dropped, the ability to run programs remotely became less important than the ability to send and receive electronic messages. Email quickly became one of the principal uses of the developing networks. As useful as electronic messages are, they are not very flexible if you want to circulate information among a group of people and allow them to discuss a topic. Two approaches to this problem were developed that expanded on the basic idea of email. The first was the mailing list, a computer program that would forward the same message to a list of addresses. If you subscribed to the list, you would receive any message that was sent to the list. The lists were not limited to serious topics. One of the first ones was SF-LOVERS for fans of science fiction. The second innovation was electronic bulletin boards. You sent your email message to the bulletin board where it remained for a period of time. Anyone who saw it could reply to you directly or could post their own message. The first bulletin board system was usenet which began operating in 1979. There are separate bulletin boards (called newsgroups) for different topics. True to the decentralized concept of the Internet the usenet bulletin boards are located on many different computers which communicate with one another to keep their copies of the messages up to date.
Electronic mail and bulletin boards have proven valuable and have spread beyond the Internet. Bulletin board systems based on home computers with modems offered email to local subscribers and in 1983 many of these were linked together into a loose network called FidoNet. FidoNet was based entirely on communication over phone lines. Commercial information systems such as Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy also offered email. Within the last few years, virtually all of them have connected to the Internet so that the number of different (and incompatible) email systems is shrinking.
As the net grew, ways of using it expanded as well. One advantage that centralized commercial systems such as America Online had was the ability to allow people to communicate in real time by typing messages that were instantly distributed to others who were logged in. They could also play interactive games against one another in real time. A simple messaging system for sending a message to a single location was present in early versions of the Internet, but allowing several people to send messages at the same time was not really possible until the development of Internet Relay Chat in 1988.
Much of the software for the net was developed by people in their spare time and was made freely available for use by anyone else. The problem on the Internet was that you could only get a file if you knew exactly where it was. In 1990 a program called Archie was released that allowed people to search archives of hundreds of computers to find a particular program file.
The watershed year for the Internet as we know it today was 1991. A strong method of encrypting information was released (Pretty Good Privacy) which is closely related to the methods used today to encrypt commercial transactions. Encryption scrambles the text of the message so that, even if it is intercepted, it cannot be read. A new way of distributing textual information was introduced by researchers at the University of Minnesota called Gopher. Gopher exploded on the net as people began to make various kinds of information available. Since it distributed text only, it was well-suited to slow computers and slow Internet connections. Not so well suited at the time was a more complex system that allowed text and graphics files to be distributed and combined into a single page. Developed in Switzerland, it involved a way of formatting a document to contain text, graphics, and most importantly links to other documents. The links could be to documents or images located anywhere on the Internet. Because of this feature, the system was called the World-Wide Web (WWW). The only problem was that many people in 1991 still accessed the Internet via terminals that could not display graphics. Gopher grew rapidly for several years because it was designed around the limitations of existing equipment.
In 1992, the number of hosts on the Internet reached 1,000,000. The following year a graphical browser for the Internet was developed at the University of Illinois called Mosaic. The web caught up with and surpassed Gopher in that year. Universities and government agencies moved rapidly to the web. The US White House and the United Nations come online with the US Senate and House following in 1994. That same year the first shopping malls and cyberbanks begin to appear and Pizza Hut sold its first online pizza. To advertise their green card lottery services an Arizona law firm sent an email advertisements to thousands of people thereby introducing "spam" (the email equivalent of junk mail) to the net.
Since 1994, the number of web sites has grown dramatically. Several of the people who developed the Mosaic web browser left the University of Illinois to found Netscape, while Microsoft started shipping a web browser with its Windows 95 operating system. Competition between Microsoft and Netscape resulted in browsers absorbing the functions of many separate programs (for example email and newsreaders). Limitations in the original web standards were removed by adding capabilities for multimedia (streaming audio and video, virtual reality modeling) and interactivity (Java and Shockwave programming). Although the capacity of the net has increased steadily, the growth in the number of users and the bandwidth (number of bits moved per second) for each user has grown at least as fast.
The Internet is big, but because it is decentralized, we can only make educated guesses about how big. The number of hosts on the net was about 72 million by early 2000. Estimates of how many people are online around the world vary from about 150 to 200 million. The total number of pages on the web has been estimated recently to be about one billion.
What Do I Need to Get on the Net?
You will need four things to begin using the net: a computer (or access to one at your university computer center), a connection to a network, a browser, and a computer account (for email).
You can access the net with almost any computer made today. The net is accessible via IBM/Microsoft machines, Apple MacIntosh computers, unix workstations, and large mainframe systems. If you have your own computer, you are set. If you are a student at a university, there are probably computer labs where you can use a computer. Increasingly public libraries are also providing access to the net, so you might be able to access the net there.
Secondly, you need a connection to a network that is connected to the net. There are several kinds of connections and new options are being added. Many computers come with a modem that allows them to access a network over a telephone line. Modem connections have the advantage that you can use them to connect to the net wherever there is a phone jack. They have the disadvantage that they are the slowest way to connect. Your university probably provides much faster ethernet connections in computer labs, offices, some classrooms, and even dormitories. Ethernet connections are significantly faster and do not use your telephone line. Other options such as cable modems, satellite systems, and digital subscriber lines are available in parts of the country.
Thirdly, you may need a browser. A browser is a software application that allows you to retrieve and display web pages. Most computers come with them already installed. The two dominant programs are Netscape Communicator by Netscape and Internet Explorer by Microsoft. Both browsers have the ability to access email and news groups, although there are dedicated programs for those functions as well that you may find more useful. When you start the browser, it will look much like a word processing program. You will see formatted text and graphics and you will be able to scroll up and down the page. The thing to remember is that the documents you view in the browser are not on your computer but somewhere else. On most web pages, underlined text identifies links to other documents. If you click your mouse on some underlined text, your browser will load the page defined by the link. Web pages use a cryptic addressing system called a universal resource locator (URL) that specifies a particular domain address and a particular file at that domain. Because the addresses are cumbersome to type (and the browser is very picky about spelling), you should bookmark pages you want to return to (check your browser's help files for instructions on how to bookmark a site).
You may discover that you need some additional programs to view some pages. These programs are referred to as plug-ins because they work within your browser. For example the Adobe Acrobat® plug-in allows you to view pages that have been specially formatted. Several plug-ins give you the ability to play video and sound files while others allow you to maneuver within a three dimensional virtual space (vrml). Any of these programs can be downloaded once you are on the net. Sites that have content requiring these programs usually provide a link that you can use to download and install the software.
What Types of Media Are on the Web?
As originally conceived, web documents consisted of formatted text and images. Soon other kinds of media were added to web pages. First sound and pre-formatted documents, then animations and virtual spaces, and finally video were added. Unfortunately web browsers could not handle these content types directly so plug-in programs that could handle the new content types either within the browser window or in a separate window were developed. As new content types were introduced, so too were new formats requiring more than one plug-in program for each content type. A new series of plug-ins tries to deal with multiple content types in an effort to reduce the confusion somewhat. Currently on the web you will find all of the following types of media:
html Text. These are the standard files used on web sites. They are formatted using "Hyper-Text Markup Language" (html) which means that the file contains text and codes (markup language) to tell your web browser how to format the text and where to set up links to other documents.
Pre-Formatted Text. In contrast to html documents, pre-formatted documents are not interpreted by the web browser, but are displayed exactly as they are presented without markup codes. In general, browsers will not try to format documents that have a file extension of "txt" which is the most common way of identifying ASCII documents. These documents are displayed in your browser using a fixed pitch font (such as Courier) whereas html documents are generally displayed using a variable pitch font (such as Times Roman). ASCII is mostly used for older files that have not been converted to html and for programs (where indenting and line breaks help to make the program more legible).
html documents do not give you complete control over how your document will look on someone else's computer. html does not support some common formatting features (notably tabs). Browsers do not always wrap text around images in the same way and the sizing of table rows and columns can differ for different browsers and for different versions of a particular browser. For these reasons you will find some documents on the web that are not written in html. These pre-formatted documents use other ways of composing a document. Currently the most common alternate format is Adobe® Acrobat. Acrobat allows you to take a document from a word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation program and preserve all of the original formatting. The only drawback is that the new file cannot be interpreted directly by your browser. Adobe provides Acrobat Reader, a free program that can read Acrobat files. The reader will display the Acrobat file in the browser window.
Images. Image files come in several varieties and most web browsers support them without needing any plug-in programs. The most common types on the web include GIF, JPG, and TIFF. Each has some differences that make them more appropriate in certain circumstances. GIF and TIFF files preserve every pixel in the original file (so they are referred to as "lossless"). In most cases they will require larger files than JPG, which preserves most of the information (so they are referred to as "lossy"). Typically you will not notice the difference between the two, except that the JPG image will load much faster. TIFF files are usually used to provide high-resolution images that can be used by news media or for presentations.
Sound. There are many types of audio files on the web. Standard audio files contain a digital encoding of sound. They can be very large, on the order of 20K to 60K per second. For that reason these formats are usually used to record short theme songs, snappy quotations, and sound effects. You will run across three types on the web, each associated with a different computer type: AU (UNIX), AIFF (MacIntosh), and WAV (Windows). Increasingly, the web seems to be standardizing on WAV files.
MIDI files store the instructions for creating a melody or tune. MIDI files are much smaller, but require a sound card in your computer that uses the instructions to create the sounds, much like a player piano plays songs by following coded instructions on a role of paper. The drawback of MIDI files is that they will sound somewhat different depending on the software and hardware that is used to play them.
Recently, a method has been developed of compressing sound files by discarding some of the details so that the files are smaller and the download times are shorter. These compressed audio files are called MP3 and are used extensively to record music. There are whole web sites devoted to programs that are used to play these files and to listings of music that have been encoded. Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Real Network's RealJukebox can play these files.
The sound files just mentioned all have to be downloaded to your computer's hard drive before they can be played. This means that they cannot be used for live sound such as that of a radio broadcast. Streaming audio files, in contrast, begin playing as soon as part of the file has arrived. This feature makes it possible to send live broadcasts over the web, and allows you to listen to longer programs. The dominant format for streaming audio is RealAudio. It is supported by the RealPlayer by Real Networks. The Windows Media Player by Microsoft also supports the RealAudio format.
Virtual Spaces. Virtual spaces create a world that you can explore by using a set of controls on the bottom and sides of your browser window. You can view the world from any angle, up close or far away. They are still in the formative stages. They usually involve large files and your movement through the world may not be smooth unless the world is simple and your computer has lots of memory and a fast processor. You will need a plug-in program to experience virtual spaces and there are several for each of the major browsers. A number of virtual worlds that recreate archaeological sites and great architectural structures are available on the web.
Video. As with sound, the first file formats for video compress the images into a single, very large file. There are three major formats: MOV (Apple QuickTime), AVI (Microsoft Audio Visual), and MPEG. The biggest drawback to these formats is that you have to wait for the entire file to download so live broadcasts are not feasible and the amount of video you can download is limited by your available hard disk space.
Streaming video works like streaming audio. You begin watching the video while it is downloading. The entire file is not stored on your computer, so you are not limited by your available hard disk space. The major plug-ins for viewing video are RealPlayer by RealNetworks and the Windows Media Player by Microsoft.
Program Files. These are binary files containing machine language instructions designed to work on your computer. Web browsers will usually ask if you want to run the program directly or save it on your hard drive. Usually you will save the program and then run it to install the program. Download these programs only from reliable sources to avoid the possibility of getting one that contains a virus.
As long as you take sensible precautions, the net is safe. Growing up in contemporary society, we are accustomed to interacting with strangers in public settings. Since we access the net from the privacy of our homes or offices, it is easy to forget that the net is a public place. Information on the net does not travel directly from your computer to the computer you are contacting. It travels a circuitous route through many other computers. Each step along the route involves making a copy of your information, sending it to the next computer along the way, and then deleting the copy. Unless the information is encrypted, it can be viewed by someone else. Online vendors now generally encrypt all sensitive information (such as name, address, credit card number) and web browsers use an icon (usually some kind of padlock) to let you know that the information is being encrypted. On the other hand, it is rare for email messages to be encrypted. Unless you are encrypting your message, don't include information that you don't want others to see.
Another security concern involves information that you provide to a company or vendor when you register at their web site, which means providing your name, email address, and possibly other information. Usually registration involves storing some information on your computer (a file called a cookie). Web pages use cookies to recognize when you return to their site. This allows them to customize their pages according to your interests (and to try to pick advertising that you would be more likely to find interesting). Cookie files are also needed when you customize a web page (for example, you set up a special version of Yahoo! called My Yahoo!). When you are at a shopping site, cookies are used to keep track of your selections until you complete your purchase. You can set your browser to notify you when a web page tries to store information on your computer, and you can set your browser to refuse all cookie files.
Your name and email address are probably already available on the web unless you have had your account for a short time. Your university may include some information about you in a publicly accessible directory unless you specifically request that they not do so. You should be very careful with your social security number or credit card numbers. Before providing any information, make sure that the web site indicates how it will use the information. There are currently no U.S. laws protecting your privacy when you provide information to a web site. Legislation may be proposed in the future and the European Union has put strong restrictions in place that may eventually become a model for the U.S.
A third area of concern involves computer viruses and other attacks on your computer as a result of your connection to the net. Again, taking reasonable precautions will protect you or will minimize the damage if your computer is infected. The most important precaution (and the one you are most likely to ignore) is to keep up-to-date backup copies of important files on your computers. You do not need to backup software programs since you have the original distribution disks, but you should backup text, graphics, and spreadsheet files that you have created. Computers are very reliable, but they all fail eventually. If you lose valuable information or work, it will be no consolation to know that it was caused by a hard disk crash rather than a virus.
A computer virus is a small program that copies itself to the hard disk on your computer (and often to any floppy disk inserted in the computer). It typically hides itself by attaching to programs already present on your hard drive, particularly the system files that load whenever you turn your computer on. Some viruses simply put silly messages on your screen, others slow your computer down, and others deliberately damage or erase files. Software that detects viruses is readily available and should help you to avoid infection. Since a virus is a program, you generally cannot be infected from a text, graphic, or spreadsheet file. As computer software has become more complex, it has become possible to embed macro commands (small simple programs) into these files. Software manufacturers have taken steps to prevent these macro commands from being used to insert viruses, but no one can guarantee the continued effectiveness of these measures.
Your computer can be a target for hackers if you are linked through an ethernet connection or a cable modem and you leave your computer turned on. Make certain that you have set the security features in your operating system to restrict access to your disk drives. If you want others to be able to access files on your computer (such as your web pages), put them in a subdirectory and restrict access to that subdirectory.
You will meet people on the net via email, electronic conferences, chat rooms, via web pages, or through personal ads that people place on the net (just like those found in newspapers). Remember that you do not have many of the cues that you subconsciously use to size people up. They control every statement that they make to you ("slips of the tongue" are much less likely) and they control how much or little you know about them (via their web page or the fact that you do not have acquaintances in common). They even control every aspect of their appearance since they can send you a copy of anyone's picture. You cannot be overly cautious in these situations and no one who is being honest with you would expect you to do otherwise. Be careful about divulging personal information about yourself. If you do decide to meet someone in person that you have met on the net, take a good friend along and meet only during the day in a busy, public setting.
Is the Information on the Net Reliable?
The quality of the information on the net varies just as it does everywhere else. The constitutional protections of freedom of the press and freedom of speech are not restricted to truthful or accurate statements. You should assume that anyone can say or write anything on the web. Offensive and sexually explicit material does exist on the net. If you wish to block your access to such material, programs exist that will prevent your browser from retrieving pages from known sources of such material. Since we do not all agree on what is offensive, these programs may require some fine tuning on your part.
While we each recognize pretty quickly what offends us, we do not as readily recognize misleading or false information. In order to use the net effectively you must develop your critical facilities so that you can distinguish reliable from misleading information. The late Carl Sagan referred to this skill as "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection." It takes practice and as you might guess there are web pages that will help you learn about how to evaluate web pages (for example Internet Detective). Other good pages are Critical Thinking Resources at Longview Community College and A Student's Guide to WWW Research: Web Searching, Web Page Evaluation, and Research Strategies by Craig Branham.
Four characteristics are usually cited as important in evaluating print journalism. They apply equally well to web pages. They include the source of the information, the objectivity of the author, the logic of the argument, and independent sources of support for the argument or claim.
Another clue to the reliability of information is the objectivity of the author. There are very few topics about which everyone in the world agrees. Look to see if the author is attempting to be objective and present both sides of the issue or is advocating one side. Some web pages are clearly intended to advocate a particular viewpoint with no effort to consider other sides of an issue. Such pages can be a source of information for the point of view presented, but should not be used as a source of information for other points of view (find other web pages advocating those points of view). Watch out for a tendency in advocacy pages to dismiss counter arguments or to demean people who do not hold the view being presented.
You should also examine the logic of the arguments presented by the author. Ask yourself if the argument makes sense. Can you see simple alternative explanations that have been ignored or overlooked? Make certain that the arguments are complete enough for you to see how each step leads to the next one. Watch out for over-generalization where the author convinces you that a claim holds in one case, therefore it must be universally true. Also watch out for "burden of proof" tricks where the author tries to shift the burden of proof to the other side (e.g. "although many claims of visitation by extraterrestrials have been proven false, how could they all be false?"). Other tricks involve dismissing opposing viewpoints by questioning their proponents' motives (ad hominem attacks) or criticizing an extreme version of an opposing viewpoint that no one would support (straw man arguments).
Statistics also provide opportunities to mislead. There are several common techniques for misdirection. One involves using raw counts rather than rates. For example, "evidence of our more violent society is provided by the fact that the number of homicides increased 50% from 1970 to 1990." Of course population increased as well. There was an increase in homicide rates, but it was about 20% not 50%. A second trick involves ignoring control groups, "in a large sample, 18% of the people who ate olestra (a fat substitute) complained of some form of stomach distress the following day." True, but almost 20% of the control group who did not eat olestra also complained of stomach distress. Finally, watch out for confusion of correlation with causation. Just because two variables increase over time, it does not follow that one causes the other. They could both be caused by a third factor which was not measured in the study. For example, population growth ("The need for gun control is demonstrated by the fact that the number of homicides committed in a city is directly correlated with the number of guns sold.").
Finally, you should consider independent sources of information that support or fail to support the claims made on the page. Are you aware of opposing views or information that are not mentioned on the web page? If so, you should be skeptical of the author's authority and doubt his or her objectivity. Check to see if the author provides references for factual claims or arguments. Search the web to look for other web pages that would support or contradict the claims made by the author. You should consider the evaluation of information to be a process not an event. As you find out more and more about a topic, use your new information to reevaluate materials you encountered earlier.
When you start your web browser, a hypertext page loads automatically. That page is your start page. The default start page is usually located at the web site of the company that produced the web browser. You can change the start page at any time by changing the site listed in your preferences. You can create a small web page of your own and load it from your own computer. It can be little more than a list or a table containing the pages you most often like to visit. Alternatively you can customize the default start page or specify that another site will be your start page. Web portal sites provide a wide variety of information in a compact format including news, stock quotes, a search engine, a subject classification of the web and more. You customize the page to include particular kinds of news (e.g. only sports), particular stocks, your favorite web pages, and more. You may also be able to chat with other people who are currently online, set up an email account, or even a web page at your portal site. MyYahoo! By Yahoo!, Netcenter by Netscape, and MSN by Microsoft are examples.
Topical Guides. Most subjects have guides to the web. For anthropology try the following: Anthropology Resources on the Internet written by Allen Lutins and Bernard Clist. The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Anthropology was started by Michael Mascha and is now maintained by Eliot Lee and Jerome Myers at AnthroTech. The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Archaeology (ARCHNET) was developed by Thomas Plunkett and Jonathan Lizee at the University of Connecticut. At About.com guides review interesting web sites and give suggestions. The Anthropology guide is Alexander F. Christensen and the Archaeology guide is Kris Hirst.
Wadsworth Welcome to Anthropology Online provides information about anthropology, the web, and Wadsworth texts. You can find it at Welcome to Anthropology Online.
Web Rings. A good way to begin browsing the web if you don't have a clear idea of what you want to find is to use a web ring. Web rings are collections of related web sites. Each site in the web ring has a link to the site before it and the site after it in the list. Often the site also has a way to randomly select a site from the web ring. The main web site for web rings is Welcome to WebRing! Here you will find information about web rings and how to create them. You will also find subject classifications for the existing web rings and a search function that will let you search for web rings that have a particular word or phrase in their title or description. Below are several web rings that relate to anthropology. Adding a site to a web ring is completely voluntary and you may find sites that do not really seem to fit, but this is a good way to begin to surf the net.
Electronic mail and variations of it are the most heavily used aspect of the net. Like regular mail, your message travels to the person you have sent it to and waits to be retrieved and read. It has most of the advantages of regular mail, but it arrives at its destination much faster. One disadvantage of email is that you do not receive any confirmation that the message was read and many people still don't read their email regularly. If you receive a message from someone that you do not communicate with regularly, it doesn't hurt to respond with a simple note that you received the message.
When you get a computer account, you will also get an email address. It will be something like "jsmith@bigu.edu." The part of your email address to the left of the "@" sign is your account name while the part on the right is the domain name. The domain name is used to route messages to a particular computer that saves the message in a directory associated with a particular account. The message stays in the directory until you retrieve, read, or delete it. There are two basic ways of handling email accounts. One involves using email software on your personal computer to retrieve all of the new messages from your mail account. You can then read, save, reply, or do whatever you want with each message. Generally the messages are deleted from the computer that stores the messages until you retrieve them. This is convenient if you want to store messages without worrying about using up the space allotted for your email account. The second way is to leave messages on your email account until you delete them. This is convenient if you access your email from different computers (at your campus computer lab or while traveling). You should remember that your messages occupy space on the computer that holds your email account and you have probably been allocated only a certain amount of space. If you receive many messages or a few big messages (with large files attached), your space allocation will fill up and any further messages will be returned to the sender. You may not receive any message when this occurs. For this reason, download your email regularly (method one) or check your email regularly and delete messages you no longer need (method two).
In order to send a message to someone, you need to know their email address. While you can often find it by using some of the search engines on the web, it is usually easiest to ask for the address or have the person send you a message. If you attend a university, there will probably be a phonebook of email addresses on the university web page. When you send a message, include information on the subject line that will let the recipient know what the message is about. Due to spam and the possibility of receiving a virus by email, increasingly people are deleting messages without reading them if they come from strangers or have blank or suspicious subject lines. Most email programs also allow you to add a signature to the bottom of your email message. The signature can provide additional information about you such as your name, phone number, occupation, or web page. You can also delete the signature when you are replying to a message or sending mail to someone you know.
Electronic mail introduces old problems in a new guise, such as, spam or electronic junk mail. People are still learning how to communicate by electronic mail. Many of the non-verbal cues that we use to evaluate what someone is saying are missing: the smile or wink that indicates a remark is intended to be humorous or sarcastic; the hesitation or stress in someone's voice that suggests a reply that might not be completely truthful; the flow of someone's handwriting as a clue to his or her emotional state. In addition, we lose the cues that tell us about the impact of our own words: the frown or scowl that indicates that our words have been interpreted as a threat or insult. Finally, electronic mail makes it easy to communicate with complete strangers who don't know anything about you (such as your sense of humor). Messages that depend on nonverbal qualities are often misunderstood in electronic communication. Sarcasm usually fails. It is easy to respond without thinking, and impossible to take the message back after it has been sent. A second element of electronic communication is that we have not yet developed effective filters for the flow of information. We are accustomed to filtering (ignoring) irrelevant information from television and radio, junk mail, and people around us without giving it much thought. Irrelevant electronic mail messages seem to provoke more hostility than irrelevant information from sources with which we are more accustomed. The best thing about irrelevant email is that the lost disk space is easily recycled by simply deleting the message.
Because you respond to someone without seeing them (and they do not see you when they respond) it is easier to ignore simple courtesies and respond in an insulting or offensive manner. Read messages you have composed from beginning to end, before you send them. If you receive an insulting message, delete it and resist the temptation to reply with equal venom. You will not teach the other person a lesson and you will simply make yourself a target for further insults. Develop the ability to shrug off minor insults without dwelling on them. It will serve you well later in life. Remember that the net is decentralized and chaotic. For more helpful hints on email Netiquette visit the Netiquette Home Page.
If you receive threatening messages, do not delete them. Save them and forward copies to the system administrators (sysop) of the domain from which the threatening messages are coming. The domain is the part of the email address to the right of the "@" site. There is no standard email address for systems operators so you may have to try several ("sysop@Site.com" or "postmaster@" or "security@" or "abuse@"). Do not delete the message as your copy may contain additional information that your email software did not include in the forwarded copy. Also contact the sysop of you Internet provider or university computer center to get their advice and assistance on how to proceed.
Mailing Lists
Mailing lists make it easy to participate in a discussion with many other people. When you subscribe to a mailing list, you are asking to receive a copy of every message sent to the list. The messages will arrive as email. There are mailing lists covering nearly every conceivable topic. Topica.com maintains an index to 90,000 mailing lists where you can search for ones of interest to you. If you want to limit your search to anthropology lists, look at Allen Lutins' and Bernard Clist's Anthropology Resources on the Internet for some ideas. If the list has a web page to provide access to its archives, you can browse previously posted messages to see if the topics discussed interest you.
There are several kinds of lists. Some are restricted and some are not. Restricted lists require the permission of the listowner to subscribe. These lists are used for groups of people who are collaborating on some project and wish to restrict the use of the list very narrowly. For example, your instructor may create a mailing list for a course you are taking and subscription to the list would be limited to those in the class. Lists can also be moderated or unmoderated. In a moderated list, the listowner reviews posts before they are distributed. Moderated lists provide a further check on messages before they are distributed so that only messages on the list topic are distributed. Unmoderated lists allow subscribers to post directly to the list. This speeds up the discussion, but it may result in a higher number of off-topic messages.
If you are new to email, subscribing to a list is a good way to begin receiving email. Some lists generate many messages (50-100 per day) while other lists generate many fewer messages. A general rule of thumb is that the more general the topic and the more subscribers, the more messages per day. If you subscribe to a busy list you should check your email daily since once the disk space assigned to your account fills, every message will be returned to the sender or to the listowner (or both). If this happens, you may be removed from the list. You can subscribe again once you have cleared your mailbox. Once you have found a list that you are interested in, you will need to learn how to subscribe. Most of the mailing lists are managed by one of three computer programs: listproc, listserv, or majordomo. Completely in accord with the chaos that is the net, they use somewhat different methods of subscribing and unsubscribing:
LISTPROC
1. To subscribe send an email message to listproc@DomainName containing the message
SUBSCRIBE ListName YourFirstName YourLastName
2. To leave the list send an email message to listproc@DomainName containing the message
UNSUBSCRIBE ListName
3. To get information about other commands send an email message to listproc@DomainName containing the message
HELP
LISTSERV
1. To subscribe send an email message to listserv@Domain containing the message
SUB ListName YourFirstName YourLastName
2. To leave the list send an email message to listserv@Domain containing the message
SIGNOFF ListName
3. To get further details send an email message to listserv@Domain containing the message
HELP
MAJORDOMO
1. To subscribe send an email message to majordomo@Domain containing the message
SUBSCRIBE ListName
2. To leave the list send an email message to majordomo@Domain containing the message
UNSUBSCRIBE ListName
3. To get further details send an email message to majordomo@Domain containing the message
HELP
To subscribe to a list you need to know the list email address and what kind it is. If the list called NEWBIE@BigTimeUniversity.edu is a listserv list, you would send the following message:
sub NEWBIE YourFirstName YourLastName
to listserv@BigTimeUniversity.edu.
There are some web pages that allow you to subscribe to a list from the web. Follow the instructions and you will be added to the list. The program will send you a standard welcome message with instructions about the list and the list software. Keep this message since you will probably want to refer to it later (and it tells you how to unsubscribe from the list).
Your fellow subscribers on the list make up a limited community. They are not your friends (maybe eventually, but not automatically) and they are not a resource at your beck and call. List communities generally consist of a core of long-term subscribers and others who have recently joined the list. You can avoid the classic "newbie" mistakes by heeding ten simple rules:
1. Know to whom you are replying. Pay close attention to the "To:" field on the email messages you are composing. Some lists are configured so that when you use the "Reply" function, the message goes to the entire list. Others set the "Reply" function so that the message goes only to the person who sent the message. There are good reasons for each method, but it is easy to get them confused. Once you have learned the software, you will know how to send messages to the whole list if the default is to the sender and vice versa.
2. The list subscribers are not a replacement for the library. Do not ask for help with your homework or research paper unless you have exhausted the available resources first. Then ask very specific questions, not "Can anyone tell me about the Moundbuilders?"
3. Do not post test messages or "Hi" messages to the list. Send test messages to your friends or to yourself (your email program will not object if you send a message to yourself). Especially on a large list, many subscribers come and go all the time.
4. Do not quote someone's message, add "I agree" or "I disagree," and then post it back to the list. The list is for discussion, not for voting. The general rule of thumb is that your contribution should be longer than the part of the message you quote.
5. Never, Ever, Ever send your list commands to the mailing list. More sophisticated programs will simply return them to you (often with cryptic error messages), but if it gets through, all of the list subscribers will see that you don't know what you are doing. On top of that, the mailing list program does not monitor the list for commands so it will never see your command.
6. Don't play Paul Revere. There are many pseudo virus alerts that circulate around the net. The "Good Times" virus hoax is the most famous, but there are many others. They circulate on a six to twelve month cycle so once you've been on the net for a year you will have run across most of them. If someone sends you an alert, check it out on the web first (e.g. Symantech's Anti Virus Reference Center or the U.S. Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability). Both list real viruses and hoaxes.
7. Do not post humorous jokes, stories, or riddles to the mailing list unless that is the topic of the list. Just like the virus hoaxes, most of these have been around for a long time. Also recognize that you are communicating with many different people all over the world and there is a good chance that not only is your story off-topic, it may also be offensive to someone. In anthropology the story about the hominid fossil that turns out to be a Barbie doll has been around long enough that it has its own web pages (see if you can find them). For other tired stories visit the Urban Legends Archive or the Urban Legends Reference Page.
8. Stay out of flame wars. A flame is an antagonistic or insulting reply. On mailing lists you will meet some of the nicest people in the world. People who will go out of their way to help you with a problem or help you work out the details of an argument you are trying to develop. They will help you even though it is not their job and they will receive no compensation or credit for doing it. You will also find people who are not so generous. People who like to post outrageous statements just in order to see who will take the bait. Don't take the bait and don't respond. It is very unlikely that the person who sent the message is naive or will respond to gentle criticism (or any criticism for that matter).
9. Don't publicly point out people's mistakes. You will make plenty as you are getting started on the net, and you will appreciate people who send you a message privately rather than posting it to the entire list.
10. Finally, when it doubt, just observe. When you first join a list that has been established for a long time, spend a few weeks or a month getting an idea of the ebb and flow of topics and how the subscribers interact. If you have a question, try to locate an archive for the list (a searchable database of previous posts) to see if it has already been answered.
Distribution lists are one-way mailing lists. You generally subscribe via a form on the web page of the organization that is managing the list. You cannot post to a distribution list, it is just a channel for the organization to send you information, offers, special sale notices, breaking news events, etc. As you are visiting web pages you will run across many opportunities to subscribe to distribution lists. Subscribe to those you want, but if you subscribe to too many you will find your mailbox full, sometimes with material that looks very similar to junk mail. Some distribution lists send messages only every once in a while, while others (especially news agencies) send messages every day. The message usually contains instructions for removing your address from the list.
Newsgroups
Newsgroups are similar to bulletin boards. The original usenet newsgroups were developed early in the history of the Internet and were expanded and reorganized in 1986 ("The Great Renaming"). You do not actually subscribe to a newsgroup, although that fact is often unclear because the software for reading and posting to newsgroups has commands for "subscribing." Actually, "monitoring" would be a better term. The messages on a bulletin board stay on the computer systems of your university or ISP until you retrieve them. When you use your software to "subscribe" to a newsgroup, you are only telling the software to check that group for new messages. You can download all of the new messages in a group or just retrieve the subject lines from the messages to see if any are interesting enough to retrieve. To unsubscribe, you simply tell your software to stop downloading the messages from that group. Newsgroups do not have owners or moderators (except in a few cases) and no one knows when you subscribe or unsubscribe. Newsgroups are a good way to monitor subjects that you are generally interested in, but do not want to receive every message every person sends. Since you do not actually receive the messages, you have to visit the group regularly as messages last only a day or a week depending on how much traffic there is on the group. You may be able to find missed messages at DejaNews where many newsgroups are archived.
Newsgroups are organized around a loose hierarchy. Groups that begin with "comp." are about computers, networks, and software. Groups that begin with "rec." are about recreational activities, "sci." groups cover science, "soc." groups are about social groups and society, "talk." groups are for wide ranging discussion and debate about topics that often trigger passionate responses. Groups beginning with "alt." (Alternate) overlap with the other groups. The group started out as a renegade hierarchy for topics that were originally banned from usenet. Sexually explicit groups are present in the "alt." hierarchy, but so are groups on many other topics. In addition to usenet, there are also newsgroups maintained by major software companies. These newsgroups provide a means for people to ask for assistance and to make suggestions about new features or new products.
There are over 50,000 newsgroups archived at DejaNews, but there are also regional and local groups bringing the total even higher. However, you really only need to know about the groups that are available from your ISP or university. Most will offer access to some newsgroups, but do not offer access to all of them. Maintaining storage space and access for newsgroups is costly so ISPs and universities limit access to their local users. Once you have configured your software to connect to the newsgroup server (if your university is myu.edu, the newsgroup server will often be news.myu.edu), you can retrieve the list of newsgroups carried by your system. Once you have the list, you can select the ones you want to "subscribe" to, but recall that the subscription is only a way of telling your software to check for new messages to that group whenever you check for new newsgroup messages.
Chat and Instant Messaging
In 1988 the ability to link several people together so that they could simultaneously send messages to one another instantaneously (chat) was devised. Commercial network services such as Compuserve and America Online already had this capability. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has expanded in size and flexibility and, to some degree, has been captured by the web. IRC is like a conference call except that everyone has to type what they want to say. Since you need to type quickly to keep up, people use a great variety of acronyms to express things compactly (for example, imho -"in my humble opinion" and rotfl "rolling on the floor laughing"). There are now two ways to chat. The first is through an IRC server that handles hundreds of separate chat rooms (or channels). In order to contact them you need IRC client software (for example Microsoft Chat, available free from Microsoft). After you log into a server, you select the room you want to enter. The second way is through a web site that offers chat capabilities inside your web browser. For these you may not need any additional software or the site may download a program that will work inside your browser to handle the chat features. Yahoo! Chat and MSNBC Chat are two examples. You will have to register before you will be able to chat by providing a handle or alias (the name you want to be known by in the chat room) and your email address.
Most chats are simply collections of people who have come together to discuss a particular topic. There is no moderator and no way to keep the discussion on a particular topic. If you find yourself in a room with someone who makes you uncomfortable, just exit the room. Other chat rooms have moderators who keep the discussion on topic and can disconnect people who are offensive or obscene. Finally, some chats are organized around a celebrity guest. In these chats, you will probably need to submit your question to a moderator to get it passed on to the celebrity guest. Your instructor may use chat sessions to allow people to discuss a topic outside class or to allow you to chat with anthropology students in another class (or university). Before getting started you should look at Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Help and Chat Etiquette/Chat Protocol.
The latest development in chat is instant messaging or paging. Instant messaging allows you to send a message to another person who is online as long as that person is running compatible software. The message generally arrives more quickly than email and the software will tell you if the other person is online. The concept was first popularized by a program called ICQ ("I seek you"). AOL Instant Messenger (America Online) is one of the most popular and is freely available to anyone. Ask your anthropology instructor if he or she uses instant messaging. It can be a quick way to get an answer to a question while studying for an exam.
With an estimated one billion pages and counting, it can be difficult to find exactly what you want on the web. You can reduce the time it takes by analyzing what you are looking for. If you are looking for web sites that focus on a particular subject, your best option is to use a web site that classifies many sites by subject. If you are looking for specific facts and figures, try an encyclopedia or a reference desk. If these don't work or your question is very specific, try a web search engine.
Web Site Classifications
Many searches involve fairly general questions such as "What web sites are there on anthropology (or ethnomusicology)?" or "What web sites provide information on genealogy?" These kinds of questions are best answered by web sites that have classified a large number of web sites into subject categories and by topical guides to the web. The original subject classification of the web is Yahoo! It begins by dividing web sites into 14 categories ranging from "Arts & Humanities" to "News & Media" to "Society & Culture." Each of these categories is subdivided and subdivided again so that you can browse for increasingly specific kinds of sites. Yahoo! searches the subject categories as well as the web page titles and their descriptions. Yahoo! gathers information about new web sites from many sources and the creators of web sites usually notify Yahoo! of new web sites to add to the classification. There are other subject classification web sites, but in my experience Yahoo! is the most complete. Good guides for academic topics are the UniGuide Academic Guide to the Internet and StudyWeb. Using a subject classification web site is similar to the subject classification of your library catalog. You will find books relating to specific topics, but you will not necessarily find where a particular fact is located in the book.
The founders of the World Wide Web realized that information distributed all over the globe would be difficult to find unless there were some guides. They created the World Wide Web Virtual Library by selecting volunteers to catalog major web sites for various subjects. If you look at the list of subjects, you will see that some categories are quite broad while others are quite specific. Since they are produced by volunteers whose workload varies, they may or may not be completely up-to-date. They are a good place to start, and often the sites are described more completely than the single line descriptions in Yahoo! Another useful resource for broad subject searches is the Argus Clearinghouse. Throughout the web, people have spent time collecting information about web sites, mailing lists, and newsgroups. They compile this information into documents that are stored on the web and updated. The Argus Clearinghouse helps you to find these documents by cataloging them according to subject area, and by providing a summary and rating for each one.
Facts and Figures
If you want to know the current ruler of a particular country or the population of the world explore one of the virtual reference desks or encyclopedias. A spectacular resource is Encyclopedia Britannica which provides the full text of the encyclopedia and links to other resources on the web. My Virtual Reference Desk and Martindale's 'The Reference Desk' are the most extensive and complete of the reference desks. You will find links to a broad range of sources for factual information. Information Please allows you to search its almanac, dictionary, and encyclopedia. Two good sources of information on other countries are the United Nations Infonation by the UN (although the interface takes some practice) and E-Conflict's World Encyclopedia. A good source of maps is National Geographic's Map Machine. Anthropology Biography and Biography.com provide capsule biographies for many of your favorite anthropologists. The Ethnographic Atlas at the University of Kent provides summary descriptions of about 60 societies.
Government publications, such as the CIA World Factbook and the the Library of Congress Country Studies Series are also available. From the U.S. Census you can download the tables from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. in Adobe Acrobat format.
Web Search Engines
As you become more specific about the information you want to find, you will probably turn to one of the search engines on the web that have indexed millions of web pages. Imagine if all the indexes from all the books in the library were combined into a single giant index. You could then find not only the book, but also the page you wanted in a single search. That is what search engines try to do. While Yahoo! classifies web sites, search engines index web pages. Most search engines also provide subject categories of web sites so that the difference between the two is blurring.
The indexes are constructed by software robots that travel around the web 24 hours a day discovering and indexing web pages. The coverage that each search engine offers is slightly different. Some try to be as comprehensive as possible, but no one engine has indexed all of the web pages. Altavista, and Fast Search are recognized for the sizes of their databases. This means that they may index 350 million pages of the roughly one billion pages on the web. Each search engine has methods of restricting the search and each search engine has ways of ranking the results according to those that should be most useful to you. You should experiment with several. Some allow only relatively simple searches while others allow you to construct complex boolean queries (you can find out what these are under Help on one of the big search engine home pages). NorthernLight allows you to search a database of articles from journals in addition to searching web pages. You can then also purchase a copy of the article if it is not in your local library.
The World Wide Web can help you improve your understanding of anthropology by supplementing lectures, providing a context for the examples in the text, making you aware of current events that relate to the topics discussed in the text and in class, and by giving you tools to increase the productivity of your research. The web is not a replacement for your campus library, but it can provide you with ready access to a great variety of information such as up-to-date statistics, maps, photos, or greater detail about topics covered briefly in the text. You can also query library catalogs (probably the catalog on your campus) to check the availability of books and articles.
Library Catalogs
Many colleges and universities have made their catalogs available for online access. While some may require a special program to access, increasingly they are designed for use with any web browser. The Academic Libraries web index at Yahoo! includes over 450 academic libraries around the world including Harvard University and Cambridge University. LibWeb is even more comprehensive, listing 3500 libraries in 100 countries. These catalogs can help you locate books in your campus library and can help you find references that are not available locally (so that you can request them through interlibrary loan). Library catalogs are a good place to find out what resources are available for a term paper topic or a presentation. Often they will also tell you if the book you need is checked out and when it is due back to the library.
Not really a library catalog, but nearly as useful are the web pages for booksellers such as Amazon. If the book is no longer in print, try the used book search engines such as abebooks.com and Bibliofind. These sites allow you to search for books that are currently out of print. They often provide a picture of the cover of the book and may include review comments and a table of contents. This can be particularly helpful if the book you need is not at your library and you don't have enough time to get it through interlibrary loan.
Online Books
A number of books and articles are available directly on the Internet. You can download them to a disk and read them at your leisure. While reading a book on a computer screen is not as pleasant as reading a physical book, it does have one advantage. With an online book, you can search for any word or phrase. This is useful if you think that the author mentions a topic that you are interested in, but you don't want to read the whole book to find a single phrase or paragraph. Because of copyright restrictions, most online books are older books whose copyright has expired. It is a good place to look for works that are primarily of historical interest such as the works of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, or Karl Marx. The Internet Public Library and The Online Books Page let you search thousands of online titles including books and shorter pieces. For books relating to the United States, try Making of America, a collection of 1,600 books and 50,000 articles relating to American social history published during the nineteenth century.
Journals and Journal Indexes
To locate recently published articles relating to a particular topic, check UnCover, a database of current article information taken from well over 17,000 multi-disciplinary journals spanning the years from 1988 to the present. A relatively new web search site NorthernLight allows you to search for magazine articles and order copies over the web. Recently the Royal Anthropological Institute started The Anthropological Index Online. The Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing at the University of Kent has a searchable Anthropology Bibliography that covers the field of Social Anthropology in the broadest sense. Other indices such as the Social Sciences Periodical Index or Current Contents on the web are available as subscription services. However, many academic libraries subscribe to these services so you may be able to search them by connecting to your university library web page.
More and more university libraries are subscribing to electronic versions of professional journals. Electronic versions of a journal allow you to download an article in Adobe Acrobat® format. You can print out the article or read it on your computer screen. You should find out what journals your library gets in electronic format since it can save you a trip to the library and the information is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Writing Resources
When you have to write a paper, there are several web resources that can help answer your questions about grammar and style, copyright and fair use, and how to cite digital information. A great place to start is Duskin/ McGraw's How to Write Term Papers written by John T. Rourke. The 1918 version of The Elements of Style, a classic manual on writing by William Strunk, is available on the Net. For questions about grammar you can try two different handbooks on the web. The Grammar Handbook at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and the On-Line English Grammar by the Digital Education Network.
If an idea is not yours you need to cite its source. Dartmouth College has a nice web site called Sources: Their Use and Acknowledgment that will give you the basics. How do you cite electronic resources? The Modern Language Association (MLA) has the basics at MLA Style for one widely used approach. Another approach is described by the American Psychological Association in Electronic Reference Formats.
If you need more details about copyright and fair use, try Fair Use of Copyrighted Works by the Consortium for Educational Technology for University Systems (CETUS). The U.S. Copyright Office, FAQ has a page with answers to your frequently asked questions as well.
You can follow current events on the web by visiting the web pages of newspapers and broadcast news organizations. For national and world news my favorites are ABC News, BBC News, and The New York Times, but try others to see which ones you prefer. The New York Times requires that you register to browse the site, but registration is free. You can find an extensive listing of online U. S. papers at US Newspaper Links. There are many other news sites on the web from all over the world. You should be able to locate them at Yahoo!
To find other news stories, you can visit a topical news page or use a news search engine. Topical news pages provide links to news items covering a particular subject. For links to news stories that relate to all aspects of anthropology visit Anthropology in the News. This is a page I started several years ago to replace the news clippings that I placed on a bulletin board outside my office. The page provides about two months of news links in the Breaking News section and has archives going back about a year. Checking the page regularly will keep you up to date on the latest discoveries, research results, and world events that involve anthropology or anthropologists. Other topical news pages include NewsHub.
There are a number of ways to learn on the net. One simple way is to subscribe to mailing lists or to monitor newsgroups on subjects that you want to learn more about. There are also a variety of short tutorials on the web that help you to learn about the Internet, the world wide web, and how to create web pages. Microsoft has tutorial pages for the Internet and the web (U.C. Berkeley has tutorial pages for the Internet and the web at the Teaching Library Internet Workshop.). A nice set of tutorials on how to develop your own web resources is Webmonkey: A How To Guide for Web Developers.
There are only a few anthropology tutorials on the web. Kinship and Social Organization: An Online Tutorial by Brian Schwimmer is one of the best for kinship. Dennis O'Neil at Palomar College is creating a series of Anthropology Tutorials for different topics in bioanthropology and cultural anthropology. Richard Effland and Shereen Lerner at Mesa College have a wide variety of Anthropology Internet Activity Areas for all fields of anthropology. At the World Lecture Hall you can find online course materials for anthropology and archaeology courses (and for other subjects as well).
Online courses include longer, more formal sequences of material. Your university may offer distance education courses that you can take just as you would any other course. Online courses usually charge tuition. There are several consortia that provide information on distance education offerings for a number of universities. The largest include the Western Governors University, the Southern Regional Electronic Campus, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation: Common Market of Courses and Institutions [midwestern universities], and the Community College Distance Learning Network. Before you sign up for a course check to see that the course is accredited by a recognized accreditation organization and that your university will accept transfer credit for the course.
PART
II.
RESEARCHING ANTHROPOLOGY ON THE WEB
The web is a new research tool that can greatly assist your study of anthropology. All of anthropology is not on the web and coverage of many topics is patchy, but it is growing all the time. Any simple list of web sites is obsolete by the time it has been published. I have suggested a few places to get started with your research into various anthropological topics. With the search tools described in the previous section, you have what you need to find more and to find sites that appear after this book is printed.
As a student, you can use the web to supplement the material you are learning about anthropology from your textbook and from resources at the library. You can use the web to get the latest statistical data and news of discoveries made after your text was written. Use the web to place what you are learning in the classroom into a broader context that helps you to understand the world around you. You will be better prepared for class and will be able to participate in classroom discussions more effectively. The web can also help you to see the relevance of anthropology to other subjects that you are studying.
This part of the guide focuses on some specific areas of anthropology that you will be studying in class. For each area, the guide suggests some web sites that can help you to master the material in your text or can provide you with ideas for research papers or discussion topics. The areas listed here do not exhaust the topics that anthropologists study, but you should be able to use them to find information on topics that are not specifically covered here. The section on "Cultural Anthropology" introduces topics such as subsistence, social and political organization, religion, language, and economic development, among others. The section on "Physical Anthropology" includes information on non-human primates, human evolution, and human variation. The "Archaeology" section covers prehistory all over the world as well as historical archaeology and archaeological methods. The section on "Applied Anthropology" explores the areas of medical anthropology, the anthropology of business, forensic anthropology, and cultural resources management.
The section on "Applying Anthropology" shows you how to use the web to get information about field schools, volunteer opportunities and internships. Finally, "Careers in Anthropology" shows you how to use the web to find a job in anthropology.
Cultural anthropology is concerned with the diversity of human culture around the world. Cultural anthropologists are concerned with all aspects of human culture from subsistence and technology to social and political organization to religion and ritual. All of these topics have some coverage on the web and many of the general research tools described in the previous section will help you to find what you need.
There are many sites that classify and organize anthropology on the web. Three good places to start are the WWW Virtual Library: Anthropology, About.com Anthropology, and Anthropology Resources on the Internet. Together they span a great deal of information. Of these, the About.com site hosted by Alexander Christensen provides more annotation for the sites listed and includes more original content.
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to assume that your society and your way of doing things is the most sensible. Linda Steward illustrates the concept at her web site, Ethnocentrism by discussing our perceptions of Saudi Women's clothing. The issues of cultural relativism are nicely summarized in Andrew J. Nathan's article Cultural Values and Relativism: The Example of Women's Rights.
The Ethnographic Atlas at the University of Kent includes a brief description of 57 societies around the world. In addition, 186 societies have been classified according to 92 different variables. You can create tables between any pair of these variables. The variables include subsistence, post-marital residence, kinship terminology, type of housing, craft specialization and many more. You can quickly find out, for example, that the Aranda are the only group that have patrilineal and matrilineal moities and that patrilineal societies outnumber matrilineal ones by more than two to one.
For indices to web sites about particular regions, try the World Wide Web Virtual Library (WWW-VL): Regional Studies. Particularly useful will be the following: Indigenous Studies, Aboriginal Studies, Circumpolar Peoples, American Indians, and Papua New Guinea. Other good resources are the Center For World Indigenous Studies, NativeWeb, and First Nations dot Com - The Village of First Nations. If your research involves Latin America, you should visit the Latin American Network Information Center - LANIC web site.
Subsistence
Some of the best examples of foraging societies occupy arctic and subarctic environments. There are more imaginative web sites devoted to the people and the climate of the arctic than to any other biome. Be sure to visit the extensive Arctic Circle at the University of Connecticut and the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of National History. The Canadian Museum of Civilizations has a nice online exhibit on the Inuvialuit of the Western Arctic.
Journey to Other Worlds is an Illinois State Museum exhibit on Siberian reindeer-herding cultures based on ethnographic materials from the Russian Museum of Ethnography. Reindeer People is a virtual exhibit by Discovery Online on the Nenets reindeer herders, a people who are still living much as they did 500 years ago. The Lapps (now usually known as the Sámi) are well represented by pages on the Arctic Circle web site, The Sami of Far Northern Europe, and at An Introduction to the Sami People by Boreale.
Ethnographic studies of the foraging societies of the Kalahari desert are the basis for much of what we know about the food-gathering way of life. You can find out more about the peoples of Botswana at Okavango Delta Peoples of Botswana and at African San Communications.
Nomadic pastoralists are not as well covered on the web. The Bakhtiari have their own web site, Welcome to the Bakhtiari, where you can learn more about this pastoral society. You can read a bit more about them and see some impressive photos at The Iranian: Arts, Photography, Bakhtiaris. Vanishing Cultures, a National Geographic site, describes the nomadic Ariaal of east Africa, the Chipaya cultivators of Bolivia, and the nomadic Penan of Malaysia.
Coverage for horticulturalists and agriculturalists on the web is also limited. Eggi's Village describes life among the Minangkabau of Indonesia in a virtual exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Rosemary Gianno created a page on the