ACTIVITY 9.12
Gathering Information

Information-gathering techniques are described in detail in Chapter 4. But before you begin looking for something, you have to have some general idea of what you are looking for. You have a couple of options here.

Option 1

If you are completing this project as an isolated excercise, then the topic that guides your search could be wide open. You might want to choose one of your hobbies or follow your curiosity to focus on a topic. If horseback riding is your hobby, you could conduct on-line research on that. If you have a vacation coming up and you can't decide whether you want to go to the Grand Canyon or Mexico, you can use on-line research to gather information on those. If you are a sports fan and want to learn more about your favorite sport or team, you might use that interest to help focus your on-line research.

Option 2

There is also a good chance you are completing this project as a prerequisite to doing the projects in Chapters 10 and 11. If this is the case, you might already have your topic in hand. For instance, perhaps you have chosen to write an argumentative essay on censorship in cyberspace. If so, then it would serve you well to use this project as a way of evaluating the on-line sources you might use in developing that project.

Whatever option you pursue, your first step is to track down an on-line text which could be a Gopher document, a World Wide Web document, or even an E-text made available through CMC (a lengthy E-mail message or Usenet posting). If you are evaluating E-texts as part of your research for an analysis or argument, you probably want to find a group of potential readings based on your topic.