Well, we have a tie: Jim Safley and Robert Russell both had an impressive 7 correct answers. Olivia Ryan also got 7 (but she admitted that went over the time limit). There were also very impressive entries from Steve Sledge, Roger Mellen, Richard Harless, and Jeff Weir. Overall, people did pretty well. Still, as lots of people noted, this was a lot harder than they thought it would be. (But, hey, what would be the point if it were easy!)
I have posted online some general search tips and comments on search engines at http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/rr/f04/cw/search.html
Below is my commentary on the different items. Further comments, tips, corrections, and questions are welcome.
Scavenger Hunt Results
1. A recording of Leon Trotsky speaking in English.
http://ito.gn.apc.org/page24.html
http://ito.gn.apc.org/trotskyPCM.mp3
This one turned out to be easier than I thought, and there were also more sound files out there than I realized. The point I wanted to illustrate was about the value of specialized search engines. Alta Vista and MSN allow you to search just for sound files, which is the fastest way to find it although it doesn’t give you all of the Trotsky sound files that others located (and a number of people found speeches through Google or other search engines
Olivia and Jeff found this using the web search on the CHNM site, which came as a total surprise to me since I forgot we had that page. Terry found it through History Matters, which was also a surprise since I didn’t remember we had annotated the site.
Roger came up with the clever idea of putting “mp3” into his Google search
2. 1915 suffrage poem with the line: "When all the women wanted it."
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Bistro/8066/ADMsuffrage.html
This one was relatively easy, but some people got tripped up because they didn’t put the phrase in quotes. The words are very common; if you don’t use quotes, you get too many hits.
3. A letter from George Washington to Timothy Pickering in which Washington complains about "certain forged letters" intended to wound his character and "deceive the people."
This was relatively hard because you can’t get there with a general search engine because it is part of the “deep web,” i.e., it is in a database at the American memory web site and the search engines don’t capture databases. They can only crawl from link to link and can’t search databases.
Roger correctly figured that out and reported the address as
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/P?mgw:1:./temp/~ammem_CeFX::
So did Jeff (through a dogged search through a variety of sources) and he reported the address as http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/P?mgw:79:./temp/~ammem_043o::
But if you try those, you get a server error. Why? The LC searches give you temporary URLs, which don’t work when you try them again. You need to open the document source and you will find the correct URL buried there: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mgw2&fileName=gwpage024.db&recNum=299
But, as Robert discovered, you also get a permanent URL on the transcription page for reasons that are not clear to me:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mgw:@field(DOCID+@lit(gw350298))
Stephen found a version of this at U VA that I didn’t know about (although I couldn’t get his link to work).
4. The 18th century speech by Willie Lynch telling Virginia slave owners how to keep slaves in line.
Sorry, this one was a trick question, but it was meant to make a point about the problem of authenticity on the Web. Lots of people found a speech purporting to be by “Willie Lynch.” But almost no one seems to have wondered (and I admit that the time pressure may have kept you from wondering) whether or not this was a real speech. Robert did observe that some of the sites with the speech seemed of “dubious credibility” and he was right. The speech is a fake but one that is widely disseminated on the Web, as people learned:
http://www.ehhs.cmich.edu/~rlandrum/lynch.htm
http://www.afrocentricnews.com/html/lynch.htm
www.duboislc.org/html/WillieLynch.html
http://www.uky.edu/StudentOrgs/AWARE/archives/lynch.html
http://www.duboislc.org/html/WillieLynch.html
http://www.freemaninstitute.com/lynch.htm
http://thetalkingdrum.com/wil.html
http://www.ybmb.com/slave_control_1712.html
The best online commentary on the Lynch speech is Anne Cleëster Taylor, “The Slave Consultant's Narrative: The Life of an Urban Myth?,” in African Missouri, Anne Cleëster Taylor
5. An online debate over whether the 1962 Cuban crisis would have been different if Kruschev had sent a "fair sized contingent of Russian troops" instead of missiles:
I wanted to make a point about specialized search engines and fact that you can find this through Google Groups http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22fair+sized+contingent+of+Russian+troops%22+Kruschev&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=f7e2a102.0408122050.b289880%40posting.google.com&rnum=1
Jim came up with a a transcript of a debate between Adlai Stevenson and V. A. Zorin in 1962 about the Cuban Missile Crisis
And Jeff found a contemporary debate at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/latin_america/july-dec97/cuba_10-16.html
The most creative response was from Richard who created his own online discussion. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to access it.)
6. A complete version of "Annual Review of Information Technology Developments for Economic and Social Historians, 1993" in The Economic History Review by Roger Middleton and Peter Wardley (one of first publications for historians to talk about Internet). Roger Middleton; Peter Wardley
The Economic History Review , New Series, Vol. 47, No. 2. (May, 1994), pp. 374-407.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-0117%28199405%292%3A47%3A2%3C374%3AAROITD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N
Regular search engines offer no help on this because it is in the “private” or “gated” web; you can only get to it if you are affiliated with a library like GMU that has paid a subscription fee to JSTOR, as many people knew.
Go first to http://ers2000.gmu.edu/sql/alpha.php Then click on “J” and then go to JSTOR. Use the “off campus” button if you are not at GMU.
Actually, there is another very helpful resource in finding online journals, but it is not well advertised on the GMU library pages; go to http://library.gmu.edu/phpzone/ej.php and enter in “Economic History Review.” You will, then, learn that there are actually two places that have online versions of the EHR but only one them contains the Middleton and Wardley.
7. Four syllabi for courses that teach Murray’s book.
The trick here is using another specialized search engine; this one belongs to CHNM and many people remembered my mentioning it in class.
Go to http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi/ and enter Hamlet on the Holodeck. Some found in other ways, but this was more generally time consuming, although Robert did it in two minutes in Google.
An interesting sidelight was how many different kinds of courses use the book
7. The home page for the Center for History & New Media as it looked in 1998.
Can you find the past of the Web? Yes, as a few different people knew, you can at the Internet Archive.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://chnm.gmu.edu
http://web.archive.org/web/19980109035256/http://chnm.gmu.edu/
This is very useful in looking for sites that have disappeared, but it also poses archiving issues we will discuss later in the term.
8. A picture of Janet Murrary with the Sims
http://www.thecore.nus.edu/sts/conf00/murray/talk/5.html
The point I wanted to make was about the Google image search engine but I think a number of people found it in other ways.