Online Information Analysis & Evaluation

The field of "new media" has generated a a wealth of conventional and unconventional critical sources (books, print media articles, discussion lists, weblogs, electronic journals). Research in this field is complicated by the number of terms applied to new media, hypertext, multimedia, digital or electronic literature and art. How does one begin to find information, and, once the information is found, sift the useful information from the outdated, misinformed, or simply incorrect?

The purpose of this assignment is to do just that: Locate and evaluate sources of critical information on new media. "Critical," by the way, is not a negative term; to critically evaluate material is not simply to point out its failings. A critical analysis is an attempt to apply certain evaluative criteria to the material at hand. So a critical article on hypertext may take the form of a review (positive, negative, or mixed), an essay on some aspect of new media (such as the articles in our textbook), or even an enlightened online discussion.

For the Research Essay, your research tools will be the GMU library databases and the Internet. The library databases are excellent sources of conventional (and some unconventional) sources: books, print journals, digital journals, and a few digital books. The Internet, of course, is a vast resource, but it is far less organized than the library databases, making research particularly difficult. This assignment asks you to focus on Internet sources, precisely because of the difficulty of assessing and evaluating the Internet sources.

To prepare for this assignment, you should read The John Hopkins University Library Guidelines on Assessing Internet Sources, in particular the section on Information and Its Counterfeits: Propaganda, Misinformation and Disinformation.

The assignment has two parts:

Part One

Identify three web-based sources of information which might contribute substantially to your research for your research paper.
For each source, search out and note down the following information:

• author
• publishing organization
• Point of view or bias
• verifiability of the information
• currency of the information

The Johns Hopkins' guidelines will help you identify accurately these categories and their importance.

Part Two

Now choose the most comprehensive and potentially valuable of those three sources, and undertake the more detailed evaluation outlined below.

You should complete all parts of the evaluation, and take careful notes on your process. For example, what steps did you take to reach your conclusions?

A) Author's Credibility and Bias

1. What is the author's professional/intellectual background?
2. What other work has the author published? (Think about articles, books, etc.)
3. Based on your responses to the questions above, how authoritative do you think the material might be? What biases might your author's work contain? Would you be justified, as a researcher, using it as a potential source for an academic paper, based on the author's background?
4. Given the author's background, would you need to consult other sources to balance the viewpoint? If you answer yes, what other types of sources might you want to consult? 

B) Publishing Organization

1. Where was information you have chosen published? What is the publishing organization?
2. How credible is the publishing organization as a source of information in its field?
3. What intellectual perspectives/biases might you encounter using material from this publishing organization?
4. How might your knowledge of the publishing organization influence your use of this material?
   

C) Verifiability

1. To what extent is the information verifiable? How would you go about verifying it?
2. How coherent and convincing are the author's arguments (i.e. his/her interpretations of the information and the judgments s/he makes based on that information)? Give examples to support your own judgment.
   

D) Currency

1. How current (up-to-date) is the information?
2. To what extent is the currency of the information a relevant issue for this subject matter?
3. If you see potential problems arising out of the currency of information in this source, what routes might you take to solve those problems?

E) Conclusion

How authoritative would you consider this source for an upper-level college research project? Summarize the reasons for your decision.