Web Research

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and that they dwell therein.
--Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), African-American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, playwright and anthropologist.

I find myself researching things on the web for various reasons including work, school, and just general interest.

I have tried a number of tools to help with this research. Here are some of the things I have found.

The Process

After I find something on the Internet, I need to do something with it. The tools described below are part of the entire process to find the information and actually make it useful.

Microsoft One Note

I neer thought I'd say this, but I use a Microsoft program -- One Note. It's nifty for a couple of reasons:

You can just type. Just click on the page and start typing
You can copy material from all sorts of places including images, HTML, etc.
You can create books and pages easily.

I'm working to integrate it into the way I work. One issue may be output. The program puts out "mht" files which are unique to Microsoft Internet Explorer (of course). More to come as I work through my processes.

Jarte

[Home Page] This is an interesting editor with a screen capture utility built in. I'm just using the free version for now, loaded to a USB drive. It is not as versitile as One Note, but does get the basics done. It can save in DOC and RTF which can be opened by other programs to create web pages. I have found it very good for research and creating documentation. Here's what I do. I use Jarte to capture and basics including screen shots, comments that I type in, etc. Then I save it as a Word file, open it in Word and save again as an ".mht" file. This format is essentially a self-contained web page. It only opens in Micrisoft Internet Explorer, but this is our standard at work, so all is OK. I put these up on the SharePoint site and, voila, documentation in no time!

Search

Searching the web can be frustrating One of the most difficult aspect of web research is finding things. The next most difficult is determining if the things you find are worth anything!

Like a great many people, one of my favorite general search sites is Google.

Other, specialized search engines may help you find relevant information more quickly. But there is a lot of "clutter" out there.

Co-Citer

I have resumed using an excellent piece of software for internet research--Cognitum Co-Citer. This tool allows you to extract text from web pages, organize it, add comments to it, and export it. I'll probably have some examples for later display on the web site.

OpenOffice

Another technique that I use is to cut and paste things into OpenOffice writer (see the open source tools page). This tends to make a page that contains all the graphics and other elements from the web page.

Updated: 11-Jul-2004