Introduction: Why is a 'Comprehensive Online Document Evaluation' Needed?

In the fall of 2003 I started to develop a curriculum that would allow me to teach online sources. I began by articulating the practices I found useful from my practices as an activist and a network administrator. As an activist, I’ve sometimes had to investigate the identities of organizations online. In such  instances I’ve found it necessary to examine the authorship and geographical location of online documents. In several instances over the past two years I’ve been able to unmask ‘anonymous’ organizations or locate information that helps me personally connect the missing dots about candidates running for local elections. From these experiences I’ve come to believe that basic digital document detective work is useful for civic participation, both on the personal level and the organizational level.

I’ve also been influenced by my experiences as a network administrator, consultant, cable-thrower and developer. From reflecting on my various jobs I can now see a connection between digital delivery and physicality: the Internet exists through physical things -  cables that must be thrown over walls, snaked under desks and stretched across institutional and political borders. Correspondingly as an an activist I’ve come to see the physical geography of digital networks as politically important.

As a teacher I’ve come to understand that I have a civic obligation to teach strategies of online document evaluation that connect digital networks with their material and political realities. I need to help students understand, for example, why only the United States refuses to use a country code (example: .uk for the United Kingdom) in front of its military (.mil) and government (.gov) top level domains (TLD’s). I need to be able to explain to students how these types of hierarchical addressing schemes have a significant impact - for certain audiences - on the rhetoric of documents that are hosted from these top-level domains. I need to be able to explain how this type of positionality has an impact and is impacted by current social, political and material realities.

From these perspectives and with these goals in mind I develop this ‘comprehensive online document evaluation’ system as a research unit for my spring 2004 writing course. It is my hope that this system helps students, activists, and teachers to create a more comprehensive picture of how a digital document ‘works’: from finding the identities of the author(s) to searching out past revisions of the document, to situating the document in time, place, and determining the physical and geographic locations of documents.

I want my students to not only cite online documents, but also critically research the questions of the who, what, when, where and why of digital texts. In order to begin answering these questions I will  introduce six network utilities and resources that can assist activists, teachers and students. Many of these methodologies may initially seem foreign (particularly traceroute) but may feel more familiar if thought of as digitally comparable to how the system of longitude and latitude allows for a ships navigation across the earth’s sphere, or how the decimal system allows for the quick location of circulation materials in a libraries vast archives.

What follows is a brief explanation and guide to these six resources with an accompanying student worksheet. At the end of each section I will try to explain more thoroughly what the value of the resource is in understanding and evaluating the rhetorics of online documents. At the bottom of each section is an example of how one might fill out the student worksheet. In each section I try to provide a range of case examples through the use of a wide range of example websites. At the end of this piece I will provide more reflections on how this material might be taught.