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internet or book?

honeydevil

honeydevil

Active Member
i just make research on a couple of projects and i wanted to ask if you, personally, prefer the internet or a nofictional book to do your research??

i like the net better, because if i have a book to look this stuff up, i have to go through all this 300 anything pages to find the one fact i need, and in the net i just put in what i search for and it pops up in front of me!! without reading through all this pages!! :)
 
Prefer the internet its much faster to find what you need, and since a lot of the things I have to write about are quite recent there isn't always books about it. Google is your friend..
 
I use the Internet to check facts and get quick answers, but I wouldn't use any of it in a paper... If I want to get it right, I go to the library.
 
search engine

I like using yahoo to search better than google
(I have personal reasons for that tho')

I also like using www.dogpile.com to search

dogpile combines different search engine results on one page
 
Books, generally. I feel that the old rule of "don't believe everything you read" is particularly important on the internet. Even then most professional-looking websites seem to have a tendency to publish even the most ridiculous assertions and rubbish.
As with everything, it's a case of finding out what resources you can trust, but I find that there's too much noise, particularly sites that'll gladly spread misinformation because of the writer's blissful ignorance of his own misunderstanding of the topic. For programming, for instance, there's a TON of ludicrously horrible sites, and if you're not familiar enough with what you're looking for yet, you might not think to question the veracity and quality of what you're reading.
I do tend to use the internet as a jumping-off point - if what I'm looking for is something I can get any good info on online - and then try to find some more in-depth books.

Not to say that there aren't tons of just as bad books out there, of course.

Despite all this, I do use the world wide web a lot to research certain topics, particuarly technology and programming-oriented ones, as you can often find official websites and serious discussion forums where the worst dreck will generally be challenged rather quickly.

The example you give makes me wonder if you're actually talking about real research or just looking up small bits of info, though, as the internet is of course quite nice if what you're looking for is mostly simple small facts and bits of reference.
I might be a bit too negative towards the web in this post, and it's pretty much just because I've had too many experiences with people who, for some reason, bypass all their critical thinking skills the moment they receive a packet from the web. The web is -great- for those quick curiosity-bursts when you just want to skip merrily on the waters of a subject without heading for the depths.
 
The project I and five others have just finished is almost solely based on tekst from the internet. The subject we wrote about was so recent that there was no books about it.
Finding our sources on the internet we had to make sure that the persons writing it had a basis for doing so and that the website it originates from is one you feel you can trust.
 
I don’t think anyone will argue, honeydevil, that the Internet is your best friend for school-like research. But, within this thread I see potential for an interesting topic: Are books dead for reference and research?

I personally like books more than electronic information. But it is nothing more than sentiment. I know there will be many who disagree with me, but I believe books are completely useless for research/reference. Even the research I’ve been exposed to as a graduate student confirmed this. We look up 99% of our journals references electronically.

There is just too many benefits associated with electronic information to ever use antiquated books. Some argue that electronic references (like the Internet) do not have proper conformation as to its validity. I agree, but there are so many sites with massive encyclopedia-like information updated by legitimate sources continually that we can turn to for accurate and updated information.
 
you're right in the net is a lot of junk, but i mean you don't go just to one page and take everything off it!! you search in different things and when you got whatever 5 different pages and 4 tell you the same and the 5th one is full of crap, you won' t take the junk, do you?? i like books sometimes!! when they have a good topic and when they are parted in a lot of diffent things!! :cool:
 
I agree wholeheartedly with Øystein.

hay82 said:
The project I and five others have just finished is almost solely based on tekst from the internet.
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Sorry, I just thought that was incredibly cute.
 
honeydevil said:
you're right in the net is a lot of junk, but i mean you don't go just to one page and take everything off it!! you search in different things and when you got whatever 5 different pages and 4 tell you the same and the 5th one is full of crap, you won' t take the junk, do you?? i like books sometimes!! when they have a good topic and when they are parted in a lot of diffent things!! :cool:
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The problem with the Internet is that a lot of sites just copy content. It's plagiarism heaven. So if you have one crappy site that everybody copies (for whatever reason), you might end up thinking they are offering you correct information.
 
lies said:
The problem with the Internet is that a lot of sites just copy content. It's plagiarism heaven. So if you have one crappy site that everybody copies (for whatever reason), you might end up thinking they are offering you correct information.
Click to expand...

i mostly look for art or history and you can't change both of them to something different, i mean in history, something happened or not, but you're right it depends on the topic you research and a lot of people are just to lazy to try to find the right information, i think the best way is to go to the libary, take a few books and sit with this books, a pen and a piece of paper in front of you screen and put all the infos you got out of the book and the net together!! and if you put your own thinking, relations, research in it, it should be pretty interesting!! :)
 
Halcyon said:
Are books dead for reference and research?
Click to expand...

Dead? No, but certainly badly battered. A major publisher here in Norway has recently put together a new encyclopedia set, and I'm definitely interested to see how well it will do. Nowadays many families already own encyclopedias, which will hinder sales, but more importantly, I think* the average person under forty years of age feels that it's not worth throwing hundreds of dollars at a big set of books, when they already own a computer and can hit google or wikipedia to get pretty much the same, and plenty more to boot.

Personally I love reading encyclopedias; both to look up specific things, and to just languidly browse, or to follow up various related threads. While a site like Wikipedia can be good for following threads, I find that a physical encyclopedia is more likely to take me into topics I never thought about in the past.
Plus, there's the romantic factor, which the internet -definitely- lacks. Romancy is a luxury, and I fear that's what publishers are going to have to focus on in the future. It makes me wonder how long it might take until we get a proper backlash against the more and more internet-dependent lives we've been building in the last five-to-ten years.

It's pretty sad, in a way, that I'm a master's student in IT, as I'm becoming more and more of an anachronism, at times almost a luddite.

*fear is the word I want to use, but it seems both dreadfully melodramatic and snobby.
 
depends on the kind of "research". right now reading house of leaves, which has a lot of cultural reference points I don't know. google is great for that. but I was doing research for potentially writing a novel set in a certain time period, and that was about half and half. you can find details on the internet but it's harder to get a complete picture the way you do from a few good books.
 
it depends of the kind of research we are talking about, now as a phd student i cant use nothing that doesnt come from an "serious" source since the university wouldnt take it, so internet its good to get an idea of what to look for, who are the academic leaders on certain subjet or to see on what books or authors i can find what im looking for, so basicly unless its an interview, spech or contents from an online magazine of a cientific journal its not good.
 
mr_michel said:
it depends of the kind of research we are talking about, now as a phd student i cant use nothing that doesnt come from an "serious" source since the university wouldnt take it, so internet its good to get an idea of what to look for, who are the academic leaders on certain subjet or to see on what books or authors i can find what im looking for, so basicly unless its an interview, spech or contents from an online magazine of a cientific journal its not good.
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That seems ridiculous to me. A source need be valid, not “serious” in order for your “university to take it.” The whole idea of graduating with an advanced degree is to contribute to the development of your field of study. To exclude the opinions of research scientists (scientific or liberal art orientated) who keep pace with the latest developments in scientific research and publication on their personal sites and all the other internet resources besides what you mentioned is absurd.
 
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