~ Evaluating essays ~
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Evaluating
essays |
Version March 2000
1) [Old methods, recent syntoms] by fravia+, March 2000 (in fieri)
Old methods, recent syntoms
by fravia+, March
2000 (in fieri)
Reading the material you find around the web about evaluation,
you will notice that it boils down
to some common 'basic' rules. The problem is that, like all generic rules, they are
not
enough, even if they were all valid,
to 'feel' if a site is bogus or not will still require
some 'Fingerspitzgef�hl'. Basically
I believe that when
looking for information on the Internet
you will need to use the same critical
evaluative skills that
you would use when choosing or reading
a book, when using a paper index, when evaluating a musical score, or
when deciding about the value of a database.
For this reason you should by all means and aforemost
head [Sielaff's] teachings.
Let's have a closer look, evaluating critically the data
you'll find is for sure very important within the morass of networked
data, where few
valuable nuggets are submerged by an incredible amount of junk:
- Internal (Intrinsic) clues to the 'credibility' of the target
site
- Author's own qualifications
- Bibliographical precision
- Style patterns and Language correctness
- Update frequency
- Bias ("equilibrated essay style" being preferred in most
case)
- External clues to the 'credibility' of the target site
- HTML Style of the site
- art and kind of sites linking to the target site
- art and kind of sites to whom the target site
links
- 'Librarian' clues to the 'credibility' of the target site
- is there any feedback provision?
- how is the indexing of the target site performed?
- is the target site easy to use and navigate?
- does its content addresses 'the real needs' of his users?
I will not deny that some of these rules are (at least in part)
correct, but I would like
to note that some of them are obsolete. It is the case -for
instance- for rule 1.3 (style and language). this kind of
approach does not have much
sense on a more and more
pidging-english and multi-cultural web, where a very valuable
apport can be expressed
with a very poor english. You should not care about the
presentation,
spelling, or grammar of the written work that
you evaluate except when the wording is so unclear that the
message
results unclear, imprecise, or ambiguous.
I am personally
unconvinced by rule
1.5: the apparent lack of bias and political correctness
of the textes being often just a simple rethorical cover for very
partisan positions ("look!
It looks really like I'm really neutral and unbiased, my dear
friend and future client"). Note that the viewpoint of the site may be
explicit -say included in a
scope statement- or you may be able to confirm your suspicions
only analyzing the point of view that 'transpares' through
the contents of the site, which you should by all means always do,
scepticism is a very sound attitude when perusing the web.
Rule 2.1, on the other hand, is patently absurd only if it tries
to
identify a 'positive' style for evaluation purposes, but I
personally
found that it is after all a useful rule for judging immediately
the 'negativeness' of the sites you found, as I will
explain below.
But the rules above need to be implemented:
A common problem is due to the many 'hidden' forms and techniques to smuggle
advertising inside the pages you will find,
which
seem definitely more difficult to differentiate - on the net than
in printing,
on the streets or in
mass media & television channels. The various techniques used for
[reality cracking] purposes can come
- I believe - very handy in such contexts.
Note that very often the commercial label of a given font is
blurred: a growing number of sites may have started out
because some people felt that the content belonged on the web, but
now many of these sites wish to take advantage of their 'position'. I doubt that
you'll be able to find nowadays
many "important" sites without any advertisement whatsoever (bar mine :-)
Your own maturity is required: the important thing to pay attention
to is whether a
site has valuable content or not and whether its presentation or
biases make any difference in terms of what you need to get out of
it.
Yet another problem is due to the incredible "individual" possibilities
and to the half-anonymous character of the media:
it is definitely possible on the web for individuals to
share working papers or
information they have been working on very seriously, but
as you can imagine, there is no guarantee that this work
has undergone a rigorous review
process, in fact it hasn't probably
been through the
peer review processes that are intrinsic to scholarship (even if those
same processes are very often far from being perfect, as anyone that
works in an university knows). This opens the doors to all sort of scams: you
could easily (with a little phantasy and a little research) put up a beautiful
'University of Cordonshire' and start distributing interesting
courses for distance learning MBAs that would have more or less the same chances of success
that all the other scam schemes that already exist (have a look at the last dozen
pages of each issue of 'The Economist' if you want to see a nice mix between
real and bogus universities targeting ignorant CEOs that need university
papers on-the-fly :-)
Anyway the fact that the work you must evaluate was not
examinated and did not went through 'the trade
publishing industry' has
some disadvantages and
not only advantages :-)
Note moreover that the 'free' characteristics of the Web
stimulates the experimentation, by all types of publishers, of various forms of
parallel publishing
with -say- a printed magazine and the supplementary publishing of
"some" information on the Internet, mostly holding back
some important stuff in order to sell the print publication.
Since in most cases there is somewhere a 'correspondent'
database on-line (which requires payment to be accessed), power seekers will
probably - ahem - have to learn to
find their way to the 'unrestricted' publications as well. It is nevertheless
important to realize that most of the results you will get from a search may be
(for profit reasons) in their 'crippled' form, and you will have to 'cut deeper'
to get the meat, should you fancy to do it.
So, once more, I will not deny that some of the rules listed above are (at
least in part) correct, but
I would like to add some rules of mine, that I found VERY valuable
in order to quickly
evaluate results in our more and more commercially infested
web.
Fravia's "negative" evaluation rules (in fieri)
-
"Slides" style
More and more sites have adopted the zombizied slide-presentation
model. You have to click
a dozen times to scrap together the (meager) content that could
have been presented - and
more easily printed - on a
single unique page. The point is exactly that: those sites are
built on the "visual"
assumption that zombies
will never print any info anyway, being to busy 'butterflying' from
one site to another.
This slide-sliding is -obviously- not only limited to the
net. I have personally experienced that
it is more and more common, when all you want to do is to buy some
product or make some
strategical decisions that you have - of course
already duly investigated before, to be pestered by slaves
incredibly keen on presenting
their idiotical industry through incredibly boring slides, often
full of irrelevant wordings, so
many site seem to want to present info in a "crumble" way that
will get you bored before long.
- Money traps
-
link bazaars
-
Publishing - advertising frenzy
to be continued
(c) 2000: [fravia+], all rights reserved