Caulfield and Wineburg’s Verified was once again the topic for this week. They had some interesting points to bring up in chapters four and five, such as the importance of lateral reading, understanding the limits of your own knowledge, and identifying the patterns of information found in search results. We also took more steps to utilize Markdown to our benefit, and we dipped the tiniest little pinky toe into the world of HTML and CSS.
So, what exactly did Caulfield and Wineburg want to tell us this week?
Lateral reading is a skill professional fact-checkers work to hone–but it’s one we can easily practice, too. It means reading not just what you’re presented with by any given source, but reading around it, beside it, and outside it. What do other sources say about the same topic? Are they even talking about it, or is it fake information? What do other sources say about your source? Do they praise it for its trustworthiness, or do they condemn it for its habit of falsifying records and stretching the truth? Caulfield and Wineburg urge us to “marshal the web’s web-like qualities.” The internet is made up of connected information, so use that to your advantage when researching a source.
It’s also a good idea to do this because it’s highly unlikely you’re only exposed to topics upon which you’re the utmost authority. In Verified, it’s stressed that you need more information, basically every time, in order to get a better grasp on the information or situation you’re looking at. Get informed, and you can more easily avoid getting ‘got.’
Something interesting the authors brought up that I had never really considered before was being aware of what “information neighborhood” a search might land you in. They tell readers to be aware of the “gestalt”–or “vibe”–of a collection of search results in order to quickly assess if you’re on the right track to finding trustworthy sources. If every result is only harping about someone or something’s best or worst qualities, you may want to rephrase your search query. Or, if every source on a topic is someone’s conspiracy bunker blog and there’s a distinct lack of academic, news outlet, or otherwise more trustworthy source, maybe it’s time to rethink the validity of the claims at hand. The goal is to find neutral, unbiased sources.
And what about our own internet forays this week?
Well, we practiced skills from Caulfield and Wineburg on a source in class to assess the validity of its claims. Getting practice tracing claims and using the internet as the web it was designed to be was both fun and a hands-on way to understand the importance of the concepts discussed.
Additionally, we worked on our own writing for the internet. Markdown has some intimidating features, like adding and resizing photos and exporting the proper file type, that we were coached through. It’s hard to understate the importance of file management, we learned, because Markdown will have a hard time operating properly without some guidance on your end about where it should find assets. We even got a sneak-peek at future class content when we took a look at what the HTML version of our Markdown writing looked like–and how to use a couple lines of CSS to edit it. It left me excited to learn more about other computer languages; the power HTML and CSS have to customize and create is exciting, like an open sandbox to explore.
The internet can feel like a fundamentally untrustworthy place, but with a few precautions and easy skills, we can find good information. Remember to read outside your initial source, and make sure you’re aware of the kind of results your search query pulls up. It’s important to understand how the internet works when we decide to do our own writing, too. The more we know about how it’s built and how it finds works of writing, the better we’ll be able to curate our own catalogues of work and toolbox of skills to create meaningful things online.
Comments
3 responses to “Adventures in Markdown and Internet Sleuthing”
Seeing glimpses of CSS and HTML excited me as well. I look forward to truly personalizing our sites. I liked when you said, “Get informed, and you can more easily avoid getting ‘got’” because that is a funny way to put it. Those who seek to mislead on the Internet know how to take advantage of what people don’t know, and the only way to know what you don’t know is to look for more information. It seems very valuable to get a birds eye view of a topic before diving in to better understand how the parts interact. Everything is more complex than a yes or no and I think the gestalt idea starts touching on that.
Hi! I loved your post, and how informative it was. It served as a great recap of these two chapters. I particularly liked how you phrased the (in my opinion) key point to the readings by writing, “In Verified, it’s stressed that you need more information, basically every time, in order to get a better grasp on the information or situation you’re looking at.” I think this is the key point the book is trying to make. Verified has taught us how to look at research and the internet in a different light, so in short, this book is doing exactly what you say, it’s helping us grasp information and use the internet in a more efficient way. Overall, I think you do a great job at summarizing these chapters! Also, I wasn’t in class on Thursday, so I feel like I missed a fun day (LOL). Great job on this post, and I can’t wait to read more from you in the future.
CSS, while still ridiculously confusing to me, is a really fun tool to play around with. It’s been exciting to play around with my guide (mostly making it look uglier). Your breakdown of Chapters 4 and 5 of Verified was great. Learning how to properly fact check, especially given how much information we’re fed through the internet on a daily basis, is only becoming more important every day. I also fully agree with your assertion that these skills are easy. It shouldn’t be hard to fact check, but I know that I’ve been guilty of assuming that the right information is too far out of my reach when it just isn’t.