Organizing the World Wide Web

According to current statistics, The World Wide Web now contains more than 100 million websites, 63 billion web pages, and at least one trillion unique URLs. This is a mind boggling amount of information. Is it organized? How does the organization of the library and the WWW differ?

Tim Donahue

Is information alive?

In your video viewings for next week on the birth of the computer and the emergence of search engines, both George Dyson and Larry Page discuss computer intelligence as having life-like properties. Dyson even suggests that evolving binary computations and data are themselves living entities. Do you believe that artificial intelligence is alive? In what ways can information be said to be alive? Which is more life-like, information or knowledge? Are your searches smarter than you?

Tim Donahue

Citations, Citations, Citations !

You will spend a significant amount of time, effort, and attention during your college education properly citing sources of information used in your research. Why? Is proper citation worth the effort required? What do you like/dislike about constructing citations, quotations, footnotes, and bibliographies?

Tim Donahue

Books vs. Articles

Books and articles are the two main formats of textual research. In terms of content, what do you consider to be the difference between books and articles?

Tim Donahue