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Research Online
D.R. Wilson and David L. Carlson Table of ContentsPart I. A Guide to Using the InternetIs the Information on the Net Reliable?
Part II. Researching Sociology on the InternetSocial Structure & Interaction
This guide is written for students who are generally familiar with the World Wide Web and the Internet. The Internet can be useful as a valuable tool for researching social topics. The goal of this resource is to help you use the Internet as a learning tool for your sociology course assignments. 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 sociology into a broader context. The newest edition of the American Psychological Association Style Manual (APA 6th ed.) provides guidelines for the correct format for referencing Internet sources. Some of these guidelines are presented here. Part II focuses in more detail on parts of the World Wide Web that cover sociology. Research methods, socialization, culture, social groups, families, deviance, inequality, institutions, social dynamics and social change are all discussed. Within each of these fields, students are introduced to specific web sites as starting points for Internet research. In addition, there are sections on professional organizations and careers in sociology. 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 a wide variety of resources more effectively. It can also help you find material that is not readily available. You can use the Internet to keep up to date on current news reports or topics that are covered in your textbook or in class lectures. Accessing the kinds of information you can find on the Internet can help you to be a better student in several ways. You will be able to ask better questions in class and you will enhance your learning if you link your course content to what is going on in the world around you. Using the Internet to supplement your study of sociology can be a successful active learning strategy. You can join chat rooms and discussion boards. Evaluating these sites will strengthen your ability to interpret arguments and compare contrasting views. You will also develop better skills as a critical thinker, because you will find a variety of viewpoints on the web. If you are a sociology 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 enhance classroom instruction.
These are just some starting points for researching social phenomena using the Internet. As you become more familiar with the web, you will certainly find other useful sites and more ways to integrate the web into your study of society. PART I. GUIDE TO USING THE INTERNETYou 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 sociology, 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 concern-ing what is out there 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 communica-tion 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.
These Quick Tips are based on information provided by Laura Cohen. A more detailed
description can be found at this website: 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, someone else can view it. 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 en-crypted. 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 a hard disk crash rather than a virus caused it. 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 manufactur-ers 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.
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.
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. The source of the information includes the author and the publisher of the web page or pages. In some cases they will be the same person. The fact that someone is an expert on a particular topic does not mean they are always correct, but it does indicate that they have spent considerable time studying and researching the topic. They are likely to have considered many alternative explanations and are likely to make appropriate judgments regarding relevant versus irrelevant facts. Authority is limited, however. A world-recognized authority on particle physics is not necessar-ily an authority on anything else. In print journalism, an important role of the publisher is to provide fact-checking and independent verification of the claims made by authors. In professional journals, other authorities review articles before they are published. However, on the net, it is not always easy to determine if there has been any independent evaluation of information. News organizations who depend on their reputations for accurate reporting are likely to have conducted some level of review on the material distributed on their web sites and some technical journals use peer reviews for articles published on the web. In most other cases, the fact that an organization hosts a web page should not be considered as evidence that the material on the page has been reviewed or verified by anyone. In some cases it may be difficult to determine the author of a web page. If there is no information about the author, you should be more skeptical of the accuracy of the material. 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 and 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 that was not measured in the study. You should always consider independent sources of information that support or fail to support the claims made on the page. Are you are 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. 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 disadvan-tage 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 simply deleting the message easily recycles lost disk space. 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 LISTSMailing 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. Lizst maintains an index to 90,000 mailing lists where you can search for ones of interest to you. There are several kinds of lists. 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 list-owner 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 day while other lists generate many fewer messages. A general rule of thumb is that the more general the topic, the more messages per day 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.
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). CHAT AND INSTANT MESSAGINGIn 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 Micro-soft 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 sociology 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 sociology 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.
NEWSGROUPSNewsgroups 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 com-mands 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. 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 news-groups 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 news-groups 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.
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 CLASSIFICATIONSMany searches involve fairly general questions such as "What web sites are there on sociology (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 to 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. A good guide for academic topics is the UniGuide Academic Guide to the Internet. Using a subject classification, this 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 volun-teers 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 Internet Public Library, a public service learning and teaching environment maintained by the University Of Michigan School Of Information. For sociology there are a number of subject guides. The best include the following: WCSU List: Sociology Internet Resources a site maintained by Western Connecticut State University; the World Wide Web Virtual Library: Sociology; now maintained by Dr. Carl Cuneo, Dept. of Sociology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; and finally for a more global search, the SocioSite based at the University of Amsterdam is an entire information system with subjects, sociologists, data archives, research tools and much more.
There are a handful of general sociology sites where you can get your feet wet in the discipline. The second section of this book goes into all the detail of the many subcategories that look more like the table of contents in your introduction to sociology text. Sometimes when you are beginning the whole process of research it can seem overwhelming. These sites are general enough to help you become familiar with what is available out on the Internet and most importantly, what this kind of research “looks like.” Here are just a few that you might want to bookmark on your computer while you’re taking sociology courses.
FACTS AND FIGURESIf 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 encyclope-dia. Two good sources of information on other countries are the United Nations Infonation by the UN (although the interface takes some practice). A good source of maps is National Geographic's Map Machine. The Dead Sociologists Index and Biography.com provide capsule biographies for many of your favorite social thinkers and sociologists. Government publications, such as the CIA World Factbook and the Library of Congress Country Studies Series are also available for collecting both statistical information and culturally specific content. From the U.S. Census you can download the tables from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. in Adobe Acrobat format.
WEB SEARCH ENGINESAs 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. 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. Some of the most effective search engine sites include, Google, MSN and Netscape. You can designate these as the “home page” of your computer. Ask Jeeves is a site where you can actually type in a specific question and you will get a number of suggested sites that might contain useful answers. You might even discover some sites that you wouldn’t have thought to include in your general search.
TOPICAL GUIDES TO SOCIOLOGYMost subjects have guides to the web. As mentioned before, a great starting point for sociological searches is a site created by Dr. Michael Kearl at Trinity University named A Sociological Tour Through Cyberspace. Other useful guides include: The SocioWeb created and maintained by Mark Blair of Pacific Web, or the University of California at San Diego’s site at Data on the Net. At About.com guides review interesting web sites and give suggestions. Virtual Society is Wadsworths’ online sociology site. It provides information and links related to sociology, the web, and Wadsworth texts.
WEB RINGSA 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. Below are several web rings that relate to sociology. 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.
LIBRARY CATALOGSMany 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 Yahoo! lists 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.com. 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 in 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 BOOKSA 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 INDEXESTo locate recently published articles relating to a particular topic, check Ingenta, 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 Northern Light allows you to search for magazine articles and order copies over the web. Sociological Research Online publishes high quality applied sociology, focusing on theoretical, empirical and methodological discussions which engage with current political, cultural and intellectual topics and debates. The University of Chicago Press has made the table of contents for the American Journal of Sociology available on line as well as an electronic edition of Public Opinion Quarterly. 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 RESOURCESWhen 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 Dushkin/ McGraw-Hill’s How to Write Term Papers written by John T. Rourke. An old standby writing style manual by William Strunk is available on the Net, the 1918 version of The Elements of Style. 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 Online 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 frequently asked questions page. The American Psychological Association in Electronic Reference Formats describes the approach you will need to use when completing sociology papers. 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.
AVOIDING PLAGIARISMFor students, one of the most difficult aspects of academic writing is diligently paying attention to avoiding plagiarism. Your professor will not know if you have made this error deliberately or as an accident. You must diligently work to avoid these kinds of problems. Remember that your professor has seen the kinds of papers that you are writing many times before and is usually very familiar with the resources and current research that you will use. According to the University of Indiana Avoiding Plagiarism website, plagiarism is using others' ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information. Western Illinois University has created a website called Plagiarism on the Web that provides a brief history of this new academic deviance and some helpful suggestions. Finally, the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University has a very helpful tool that you should bookmark and use when you are writing papers.
CITING INFORMATION FROM THE INTERNETOne of the most problematic aspects of research for students using the Internet is learning the correct way to cite references. The resource that is used for writing style by the field of sociology is the American Psychological Association Publication Manual. The most recent version is the APA Publication Manual is the 5th edition. This edition has been updated with an extensive section on how to correctly cite material that has been accessed online. Earlier editions do not contain this information – you need to use the 5th edition. The APA has a website that contains very useful information about referencing material in your research papers.
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 sociology visit SocioNews. This page, based out of Great Britain, contains current headlines as well as links to scores of news sources, journals and internet links from Europe and the U.S. Other topical news pages include Artigen and NewsHub. News search engines allow you to search recent news stories that include a particular word or phrase in the title or in the text of the story. Most news web sites allow you to search their site, but some charge for retrieving older stories from their archives. There are a couple of search engines that search over several sites. These include Excite News and Total News.
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 (Internet Guide & Web Tutorial). A nice set of tutorials on how to develop your own web resources is Webmonkey: A How To Guide for Web Developers. Specifically, there are some very helpful Internet sites that you can access to help you improve your learning while in college. The Taxonomy of Socratic Questions website would be a valuable resource if you are organizing a class presentation. Use Benjamin Bloom’s Critical Thinking Questioning Strategies when you are assigned a small group discussion or a general class discussion. Learning how to ask the right kinds of questions should make learning more productive for you. Dan Kurland teaches freshman and developmental reading/writing courses at the university level. His website, Critical-Reading.com, can help you to develop some important thinking skills to improve your reading comprehension. From online courses to textbook specific sites, there are hundreds of sociology learning experiences on the web. As you will discover, the great majority of these resources have been created as supplements to college courses. First of all, you should take some time to surf Wadsworth’s Virtual Society website. Here you will find a number of learning tools tailored to fit your specific textbook. The Center for Teaching and Learning – Sociology contains links to dozens of useful websites especially if you’re working on a research paper or class presentation. Washington State University is producing a number of online learning modules. Try their What is Culture? module for a subject outline, discussions, student hypertext presentations and a glossary. At the World Lecture Hall you can find online course materials for sociology courses arranged according to major topics (and for other subjects as well).
The second half of this site is divided topically. Most of these major topics will match specific chapters in your introduction to sociology textbook. Search through each section and find the topics that are of interest to you. You may be assigned projects, papers or presentations in your sociology class. Use these Internet sites to inform your more general review of literature. Many of the sites referenced on the following pages can be used to stimulate your thinking as you explore the study of the social world. PART II
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The Study of Society |
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The Tour Through Cyber Society is an information packed website created and maintained by Professor Michael Kearl who is at Trinity University. This is a highly recommended starting point for students who are just beginning their study of sociology. |
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This is the address for the Social Science Hub: Sociology. The site is maintained by Sharyn Clarkson from Canberra Australia. From this site you can access links to dozens of other information sources. If you're just beginning a research topic or simply looking for a topic to study -start at this website. |
| The Sociology Web Hawk is an enormous site from which you can access links to newspapers, libraries, journals, magazines and dozens of other sites of interest to sociology students. You should bookmark this site and use it as the starting point for preparing for class and any research project assignments. |
SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
One of the most popular sites among students and instructors alike has been The Dead Sociologist’s Society constructed by Larry Ridener currently at Pfeiffer University. On the web page you will be able to access the Dead Sociologists Index where you will find biographical sketches, a summary of ideas and examples of original work for most of the significant classical social thinkers. This is one of the most comprehensive theory sites out there. In addition to an index of classical social thinkers, you will find images, lectures, passages from core texts, and a very comprehensive list of sociology links. This site makes a great companion to introductory texts in social theory.
Surfing these pages is a good way for students to prepare for exams, complete background searches for writing research papers, and collecting data for class presentations. I have been able to use this site to collect extensive information for class discussions. Students also have found this site