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September 05, 2005

Matt's Scavenger Hunt

Well, I found seven out of ten within thirty minutes. I was on the track of the 8th, but I doubt I would find the last two no matter how much time I was given. Here's how it went down:


  1. I, too, found the Titoville site with the pictures of Tito with Amin and Mrs. Roosevelt. First, I went to Wikipedia to look up Josip Broz, aka Tito. After the dictator's biography I found a link to the Titoville website. Click here to go to Titoville's photo gallery. I was a bit thrown off for a few minutes - the website's author misspells Roosevelt as "Roosavelt," so it took me an entire five minutes to realize I'd found my goal. Total time: 5:00.
  2. To find the suffrage poem, I merely entered this into the Google search field: " 'when all the women wanted it' suffrage." This site was among the first listed. Total time stood at 5:41.
  3. I cheated a bit on the George Washington letter. Last spring term, my wife took Dr. Henriques' "Age of Washington" class, so I knew the Library of Congress had collected and archived the papers of Washington. I Googled "papers of george washington," found the hit that contained the url of the LoC, and went to it here. I searched for the phrase "certain forged letters" as a whole phrase, and the only result was the letter to Thomas Pickering. Total time - 5:53.
  4. Another easy one. I Googled "'willie lynch' speech" and found this website at the University of Kentucky. Total time - 6:33.
  5. The speech from Vaclav Havel stumped me. I didn't read the whole clue, so after two minutes of searching the congressional record I had the speech and thought I was done. No such luck. Reading further, I realized I had the speech but not the webpage. I poked around on the Web a little, and found the official Czech government website at www.hrad.cz, bu couldn't figure out how to back up and find what Dr. Kelly described as a "...former webpage of the website of the President of the Czech Republic." Stumped, I moved on at a time of 12:10.
  6. For the article from a scholarly journal, I accessed JSTOR through the GMU Library WRLC website. From there, I did an advanced search and entered "middleton wardley annual review of information technology," which returned the url for the complete article. Total time: 14:59.
  7. Again, a little bit of cheating for number seven. Last week, while looking for the syllabus for our course on the CHNM website, I discovered the "syllabus search" function. Pretty sneaky, huh? Go the the CHNM website, click on Resources, then click on Syllabus Finder on the left toolbar. From there, I entered "non-designer's web book" in the search field and found these syllabi from California State University at San Marcos, Washington State University, Western Washington University, and UVA. Total time: 16:09.
  8. At this point, I was getting cocky. I had six out of seven, and almost fourteen minutes left. I had heard about a website for archived webpages at www.archive.org, and figured this would be all I would need to find a website from 1998. After a few minutes of wrestling with the poor search interface, I gave up and moved on.
  9. At first, I didn't realize Janet Murray was the author of our text "Hamlet on the Holodeck." After doing a Yahoo! Image Search for "'janet murray' sims," and seeing the cover of our book as a result, I began an image search using her middle initial to weed out the "false" Janet Murrays. Once I found her personal website at Georgia Tech, I figured I was on to something. But after scanning the websites for several conferences she is involved in that deal with computer gaming, I still didn't find a picture of her with The Sims. I assume Dr. Kelly meant the characters from simulation game "The Sims," published by Electronic Arts. I suppose someone must have Photoshopped a picture of Janet Murray together with a shot of a few of these characters. Darned if I could find it, though. My third failure.
  10. Running out of time, I decided to find #10 quickly. To do so, I Googled the phrase "although I worry about turning the survey into little more than." I got one hit, and the resulting url was: www.historycooperative.org/ journals/jah/87.4/kornblith.html. So, going back through the library's WRLC, I logged into History Cooperative, browsed for the Journal of American History (the "jah" in the url), scrolled down to Volume 87, Number 4, and look at the table of contents for something reminiscent of "kornblith," which turned out to be the last name of the article's co-author, Gary Cornblith. Here is the complete article. At this point, I had about five minutes left, and divided it between more fruitless searches for #8 and #9. My watch beeped at the thirty minute mark, and I was batting .700, which is great for the majors, but only good enough for a "C" in academia.

All in all, it was pretty fun. It would seem that my biggest weakness is a complete inability to find "dead" or "former" websites. I never had to do it before, so I never learned how. Other than that, I'm fairly comfortable in my ability to look at the Web and separate the wheat from the chaff.

Posted by mhobbs at September 5, 2005 02:56 PM