Enough about a wealth of information at our fingertips. What we need isn’t hand-wringing over too much information but strategies for navigating our information surplus in order to nourish our knowledge scarcities — particularly in the case of complex problems involving fluid events, multiple perspectives, and competing explanations.
Does that mean we aspire to be neutral observers in the bias-free pursuit of the absolute truth? Hardly. There’s nothing indifferent or non-threatening about a mission-focused investigator with a theory to test, a client to defend, or a mystery to solve.
Searching Out Loud reveals an orderly, evidence-based process for interacting with search engines, subject directories, special collections, and deciphering their outputs and patterns. It provides a reliable and consistent way to detect, probe, and push back on expert opinions, unverifiable claims, wavering witnesses, and self-serving institutions.
These same methods form a revealing contrast between the detail-rich deep web of open sources and the shallow web indexed by the major search engines. Those are the search results our knowledge-starved colleagues see through news sites, social media feeds, and their smart phones.
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Unit Three: Sourcing — How to evaluate information quality and source information that instructs |