|
Hitchhiking on the Information Superhighway: Research on
the Net
Shane Stafford, University Liggett School, Brian Lain, Wayne State University 1994 - Immigration
Regulation : Borderline Policies |
|
LEXIS/NEXIS: simply the mention of this service gets the saliva glands of the debater started. The last two years the National Debate Tournament has facilitated the use of this service by setting up a "computer room" for teams to access their accounts. Most high schools don't have access to this expensive service, a few lucky schools are either test sites or have coaches who might have access through a law school or university. Some High Schools have gone the Dialog route which provides a similar service in concept, but much cheaper. Still the Dialog service is beyond the budgets of the majority of high school debate teams in the country. These examples are just the beginning of the debate community's expedition onto the "Information Superhighway". This article is an attempt to encourage high school debaters to explore the services of the internet. Of course, this requires an understanding of how to access, use, and explore this informational resource. What may be helpful to all high school debaters is that we write this article with a great deal of experience searching for FREE online resources. Most of the learning process occurred during graduate school, and thus necessitated finding free or inexpensive access to the internet and its many resources. We hope this type of focus encourages every debater, even those in the smallest programs to explore these options. I. What is the Internet? There are several interconnected networks operating in global electronic space. One example that you may be familiar with is America Online. This is a pay-for-service network which allows its members access to electronic mail as well as other services like chat functions and news groups. The Internet is the largest operating network in the world. Instead of having one office where users can connect, there are literally millions of "nodes" on the internet. A "node" is a local host at which a user may have an account. A local University or college may have a node or nodes for their students. A high school in your area may develop its own node. A large corporation may have several nodes in its possession for its employees. The internet is really a linking system between different local networks. Once a node is attached on the internet, communication is possible to all other members or nodes on the net. Through the use of the internet, we can send mail from our host or node to North Carolina or any of the states as long as we know the address of our recipient. A good analogy for explaining the internet is the information superhighway. It runs all over the world. There are exit signs (gateways) for most of the major rival networks such as America Online, Prodigy, and BITNET. There are also gateways to different towns, and in each town there is a way to get to the citizens (members). If you have access to the superhighway you can get anywhere in the world, and it only takes seconds to go there. II. Access to the Internet. The obvious requirements for jumping on the "highway" are a computer and modem. But, you will also need a communications software package. These have dropped in price dramatically and there are even some very good shareware programs available. Check with a university or college in your area for a free public program, these are often provided to anyone who brings in a blank disk. The final step is to find an entry point to the internet, several options are listed below. A. Pay Services. There are several for-profit companies that offer individuals access to electronic mail and many other services, if they pay for them. Some examples of these companies include America Online, Delphi, and Prodigy. This is one way to gain access, through a gateway to the internet. We have heard that prices for these services are rapidly decreasing. Also, in addition to access to the internet, these corporations usually provide their own attractions for debaters. Local newsgroups and direct feeds to wire service reports may be included in access packages. B. University Access The largest number of nodes on the Internet is definitely comprised of universities and colleges. If you are a student at even a small college or university, you will probably have at least limited access to the internet. Most universities and colleges now have academic computing departments which focus solely on running a node for the internet. If you are in high school, don't rule out a university account yet. Sometimes teachers or coaches are able to negotiate student account at universities for high school students. Some universities have programs for free accounts for educators or students. Even if you can't work out a free account, most universities have low-cost accounts that you can purchase. They will still be cheaper than service from the large corporations. C. Freenets Recently, university and college computing departments have started to lend their services to the entire community. Universities have begun to set up free-access nodes called freenets around the country. These hosts offer internet access to anyone who has a computer, a modem, and communications software. Access is free of charge. As an attempt to experiment with community access, as well as an effort to expand the availability of the internet. For example, the authors use the Traverse City Freenet (leo.nmc.edu), located in Traverse City Michicgan, to communicate with the rest of the world. If you are lucky enough to be located close to a freenet all you need to do is enter the freenet as a visitor and get the release forms (a legal agreement usually) and return them. Within days you have an account, e-mail, gopher access, and ftp capability. III. Using the Internet This section will discuss the many uses of the Internet system. The focus here is the internet and not all the possibilities of the "Information Superhighway." The only limitation to the internet is that most of the full text material is not available. Some of the opportunities for full-text material will be discussed later. The internet opens a great many doors to the debater. We will discuss the concepts of e-mail, gophers, listservs, usenet news groups, and FTP (File Transfer Protocol). These are the main tools of an internet surfer and can provide the debater new tools in advanced research. A warning at this point, this introduction is very brief. Although it will provide you with an understanding of the internet, it is best to buy a basic internet book. Try to find one which gives you "how-to" and "where is it" information. We list several at the end of this article. Before discussing the "how to" of the above list, it is important to discuss the concept of failure. As with any new computer skill, failure is quite common. But, the rewards are certainly worth the frustrations of trial and error. You may encounter rejected e-mail because you did not provide the correct address. The nice thing here is that rejection comes back to your account within hours and you know you need to try again. Gopher searches are sometime truly like exploring caverns and tunnels with the assistance of only a flashlight. We will discuss the importance of keeping a record of where you explore so you can get back to a place you find rewarding. Each of the internet functions requires a different knowledge of commands and techniques. Keep a good record of what you learn and your explorations will only go forward. Again, the rewards are there and the process is revolutionizing our methods of communication. A. What is E-MAIL? The basic form of communication on the Information Superhighway is called electronic mail or e-mail. This is the beginning of the learning process and it is amazing. E-mail sends messages from your account to the accounts of other individuals you know, similarly to going from one mailbox to another mailbox. The difference is e-mail can travel across the globe in minutes or even seconds. I had one contact in Australia (Fantasy Baseball :-)... ) and at night my messages got to him in under a minute. The U.S. mail has been renamed "snail mail" by users of the internet. Let me give you a few examples of e-mail addresses. First, lets examine mine: AC767@LEO.NMC.EDU. This is an address for me at the Traverse City Freenet. It is similar to a postal address in some ways, for example it goes from specific to general. AC767 is my personal account or mailbox. The @ symbol stands for "at" or at least that is how it is referred to by users of the e-mail. LEO is a certain computer at Northwestern Michigan College where the Traverse City Freenet is hosted. NMC stands for Northwestern Michigan College. EDU stands for the education network. The first "half" of the address AC767 is referred to as your "user name". The second half LEO.NMC.EDU is the "node" you are located E-mail is the basic form of communication of those "online". Even the most limited online access will provide e-mail and this will allow you to start exploring or at least hear about others explorations. We will discuss the value of e-mail to the debater in a later section. B. What is a GOPHER? For the true explorer, there is nothing like a good gopher hunt. But, keep your bread crumbs handy, the biggest problem is finding your way back to a favorite "hole." Gophers basically allow you to electronically search through "file cabinets" all over the world. A gopher is an archive or database of material located on one computer. Gophers allow you to move from one computer to the next without changing programs or knowing more than one set of commands. The software was developed at the University of Minnesota (the Golden Gophers) and is used to allow you to search through various titles and when you see something you want you can tell the software to "go fer" it. Many Universities, companies, organizations and government agencies have "gophers" on the internet. Now, one might ask why do we care? Well, every Gopher has different resources and many may interest the debater. For example, maybe next year you plan to discuss feminism. You might gopher to the University of Maryland which has a great Women's Studies section on their gopher. Again, exploring is a great deal of the enjoyment. How does one explore the gopher system? First, you must find out if your accesspoint to the internet has gopher capability. Most systems will have access. We will demonstrate via an example of gopher search into the University of Maryland's resources. First, find the menu item entitled "Other Gopher and Information Services..." or "Other gophers around the world" or "Other internet resources". This path will often lead you to the geographical menus which are easy to utilize, especially if you know where a gopher is located. So, we select 10 on the menu below
Now you see 10 above
becomes the new title to a new menu. Here is where we get to the geographical
list, these next few menus are almost always the same no matter where
you are on the internet.
The next menu is North America, select 4 USA.
Here we are back in the USA, find the selection for Maryland, I didn't include all the states, but we eventually find that Maryland is selection 22. BTW (hah, internet talk, BTW is By the way), use plus (+) to move ahead a screen and minus (-) to move backward a screen till you find Maryland.
Now we are at the
menu for gophers in Maryland. University of Maryland might have several
options. But for this search select the basic University of Maryland option
which is 22.
You are now in the
University of Maryland gopher. This illustrates the "hunt and peer"
method to gopher searching. You don't see Women's Studies on the below
list. So, let's try 4 Educational Resources....
Ah hah, here we see 17 is Women's Studies. But, we want to take you down another tunnel. We try 9 Government, assuming debate is a policy activity maybe there is something here.....
Here in the government
submenu, we try United States, certainly we don't want local Maryland
government information. So select 3.....
At the end of this
tunnel we find 5 Supreme Court Documents, an especially useful tool on
the immigration topic or often any debate topic. Select 5....
We have reached the end of our journey. The ability to access the full text of Supreme Court decisions on the internet. For example, try 1 and type in Haiti. You would get the decision which upheld the Coast Guard ships interdiction of Haitian refugees AND the dissenting option. Probably useful, and certainly helpful to the debater who cannot get to a law library.
That was the end of the tour, but several items are important to remember about Gophers. First, write down your path. The safest way is to keep a small notebook on your travels, write which menus you try, where deadends exist and where good resources can be found. Also, note the "/" marks at the end of many of the lines. This mark indicates there is yet another menu if you select that number. Also, three methods of making selections. First, you could cursor down until an arrow selects the number you want and then press enter, but that is time consuming. Second, you can just type the number and press enter. Third, you can often use your arrow keys to go in and out of Gophers. A cursor arrow to the right will take you in the selected menu and a cursor arrow to the left will take you out of the current menu and up to the immediately previous menu. The cursor method allows you to go one step at a time backwards if you find a nice resource and want to record your "pawsteps". Finally, the wonders of e-mail come back to us again. Once in a text file you want, for example, the decision on the Supreme Court on the U.S. Coast Guard's interdiction of the Haitians, you can mail that text file to yourself. Simple, choose "m" and the message will come up "Mail file to?", type your e-mail address on the line and press return. The file will be mailed in its entirety to your e-mail mailbox. One last but very
useful tool is called Veronica. Veronica allows you to enter a term or
terms and it will search a section of the gophers in the world and find
references to your term. Say for example, I entered "immigration"
in the Veronica software in Dallas (I wasn't in Dallas, but did this electronically)
and received a long, long list of resources. Now, many were worthless
to the debater, but some held out a great deal of promise. I am still
investigating that list. Unless you get into USENET through a gopher client, you will need a special "news reader" software program. That software will allow you to subscribe to different USENET groups. USENET groups are divided into eight categories. The designation alt. refers to alternative discussions. This is the largest listing of USENET groups. It contains an incredible variety of discussion areas ranging from a listing for-country music fans to Russian politics. The designation comp refers to computer related information and discussion. Use this group to expand your knowledge of computers and networks. Sci. refers to science news and information. Misc. is the designation of "all others category. News. is the listing that concern the upkeep and additions to USENET ITSELF. This is a kind of info and questions center. Rec. refers to the recreational categories listing. Soc. is a special listing for sociology and psychology. Finally, Talk is USENET's version of "talk radio" (Internet Resource Guide). Each hierarchy has thousands of sublistings. Tons of information can be gained from USENET. You can obtain a complete listing of all the USENET groups from the news group news.announce.newusers, as well as news.groups. D. What is a LISTSERV? The third type is a listserv which is meant for information dissemination and retrieval, not discussion. One useful such list is one which provides a daily summary of the White House Press releases. This one is a bit different because while it operates like a listserv, the address you write to is different. See the below example of how to subscribe and unsubscribe. To subscribe Send a message to almanac@esusda.gov In the body, type subscribe whsummary To Unsubscribe Send
a message to Request: 1963 STATEMENT ON PRESIDENT'S CALL WITH JAPANESE PM HATA-May 9, 1994- President Clinton spoke with Japanese Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata this morning from the Oval Office. The two leaders discussed bilateral U.S.-Japan relations, efforts to resolve the nuclear situation in North Korea, and the Framework talks. Request: 1967 PRESIDENT'S PUBLIC SCHEDULE-May 10, 1994-The White House Press Secretary released the President's public schedule for Tuesday, May 10, 1994. Then to request one
of these files the following instructions are given.... This final form is sometimes called a "digest" form of a listserv. It provides you information but is not intended for discussion. Discussion lists are primarily tools of e-mail and anyone who has e-mail can utilize this internet resource. These lists are great for discussions, we hope to establish one in the near future for high school debate. F. What is FTP (File Transfer Protocol)? There are large sites on the internet whose only function is to act as an on-line archive host. These electronic libraries house tons of text recordings as well as software programs and digital oraphics. Such sites are called file transfer protocol (ftp) sites. These stations allow users to transfer large files from one system to another. Several such hosts are termed anonymous ftp sites and can be utilized by anyone. Your computer communications software should have an ftp setting on it. Usually, however, you can directly access an anonymous ftp cite by simply entering the command ftp followed by the address. For example one of the largest anonymous ftp sites can be accessed by the command ftp ftp.uu.net. Once you attempt to link to an anonymous ftp cite it will ask for you login or username. Usually you can use the login "anonymous" and the password entered will be your email address, such as ac825 @ leo. nmc.edu. The return address allows the sites to send things to you as well as keep track of your requests Finding your way around inside an ftp cite is not all that simple. Ftp sites are normally organized around a hierarchy of menus, similar to gopher menus. The ftp.uu.net sites for example has different menus under titles such as /systems (variouscomputersystem software), /inet(general information on the internet), as well as /libraries (a list of libraries on the internet). To get the entire listing of menus for this cite you can use /index. You can change directories in an ftp sites by using the cd command. Cd /libraries, for example, would place you in the libraries sub-menu. You can list the items in a current menu with the use of dir (directory). Once you have obtained the exact name of the document you desire (and you may be traipsing through several different directories to get to it) it can be downloaded. Downloading transfers the document (be it text or software or whatever) directly to your e-mail account. From there you can download the document from you account directly to your home computer. If you went through the reverse process, posting your own notes to an ftp site, it would be uploading. G. What is TELNET? IV. Resources for the Debater This final section will make some suggestions about how the debate can utilize these resources. Please don't expect this to be the new "wonder" source of all your evidence. Unless you pay for one of the commercial services this will not happen. But, there are still many ways in which the information superhighway can assist you in competitive debate. In fact, in agreement with the philosophy of this research guide, the internet can provide you research platforms and improve your knowledge of the issues you will be discussing throughout the year. We will outline three areas where the internet can assist the debater. First, having access to the online accounts can assist in communication. Scouting, scouting, and more scouting. What better way to share information than to keep a computerized list of affirmative cases and negative strategies. One can take their regional list and exchange those list via email with individuals in other parts of the country. During, the 1993-1994 college season many teams took advantage of the national "case list." This was a comprehensive list of affirmative outlines which teams "mailed" into Arnie Madsen at the University of Pittsburgh. This list was then organized and re-mailed out across the country. It turned out to be very popular and very comprehensive. Even if the scouting list is not as formal as this the NDT one, there are many ways in which a cheap method of communicating across the country can be helpful. E-mail messages can have much more information in them than a traditional phone message and the communication later is much cheaper than paying longdistance phone rates. There are also ways to "chat" while online which become very close to a what is expected of a typical phone call. At least one tournament this past year allowed e-mail entries. Another high school is using an e-mail address to encourage alumni to keep in touch with the program. Listed below in the resource appendix are discussion lists for NDT debate and CEDA debate. There are already high school students using, these college lists to ask questions about the upcoming immigration topic. Finally, as several of the internet books emphasize, your friends on the net are critical to your ability to learn and find resources. Share the wealth. The second major asset of the internet to the debater is the ability to do preliminary research. There are hundreds of libraries on the internet, even the Library of Congress. Often you cannot get to these libraries, but debaters are resourceful individuals. There is always the possibility of ordering the book through a bookstore or interlibrary loan. Additionally, a friend at the location of the library is much more likely to be willing to go check-out a specific book than they are to just do subject research on the topic. There are also a number of libraries which have online periodical databases for you to research. There is even one site which has Reader's Guide available online. Law libraries and government depositories also have their catalogs online and in some cases available to the public Internet user. Finally, there are times when the debater can find quotable evidence on the internet. Some of these sources are alluded to in the companion article to this one. But, we will try to describe a few more examples. Let's start with USENET news groups, assuming the simpsons won't help you much. If you have access there is an entire group of newsgroups which are similar to newswire services, these run by the clarinNet company. For example, daily news can be found on clari.biz.economy or clari.biz.economy.world; both of these provide updates on economic stories. There are also clari news groups for several major regions of the world, like clari.news.hot.somalia and clari.news.hot.ussr. These may or may not provide you evidence but there certainly will provide you with information from which to make arguments. We have already noted the usefulness of GOPHER servers for full-text material when we ventured to Maryland to get the Supreme Court decisions. But, some newspapers and periodicals are beginning to dangle portions of their text on the internet. Another gopher server had online book reviews. We found one on the book HOLLOW HOPE which has been used in debate rounds in past years. Gopher exploration allowed us to find the "Chicano/Latino Net." A full text editorial on the Huddle study which was on the topic of immigrants impact on welfare services. The "free" material is there, it is just not always obvious. More information is coming online everyday. In the full-text
realm there are also the commercial services. Lexis/Nexis and Dialog were
already discussed at the beginning of this article. Probably the best
services in terms of breath and depth of selection. But, some services
are coming from full-text CD-Roms. Produces like ProQuest and SIRS have
provided students access to full-text material they would not normally
have in their local libraries. More and more full-text material will come
"online" in the future and understanding the rules and roads
of the information superhighway will be critical to the debater. Bibliography |