“Internet-Heuristics for Historians”
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Author : Assistant Professor, Dr. Andrei Volodin.

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Email to take part in this special course during the coming semester (seats are limited to computer class).

(© John Caldwell, "The New Yorker", February 7, 2000).

Heuristic is the art and science of discovery and creativity in a complex subject area like history is. (The word comes from the same Greek root as “eureka”, which means “I find”.) You do read, write or speak out publicly, but can you carry out professional search? It becomes a fundamental professional skill in intellectual pursuits of today’s information society. The rapid growth and dynamic development of information resources (primarily in the World Wide Web) obliges us to have different skills of Internet-searching.

Internet-heuristics is to help specialists in fast and efficient search for their specific intellectual tasks. To search quickly and accurately on the Internet is not only time-saving. Mastering reliable and relevant information means to make the right conclusion and take the right decision.

This course focuses on main characteristics of the “life” of academic information (its development and diffusion), and on basic algorithms of data retrieval. Key concepts of information theory, Internetics and heuristic-analysis are formulated into main search strategies.

The goals of the course is to learn students the basic information search (factual, bibliographic, and documentary), to show the development of the algorithms and search technologies, to take a closer look at electronic resources, and to advance the quick wit of audience in heuristic manner.

This course consists of four interrelated areas: theoretical introduction (Internetics and information theory), and practical units including the three pillars of information retrieval services: factual, bibliographic and documentary search.

(Methodological notes on the course were presented at the 10th conference of Russian Association for History and Computing during the session “Information technology in the historical education”, and they were published in The Newsletter for History and Computing (in Russian).

I. Plan of lectures

II. Assessments

Assessments include the following elements:

1. Participation in the discussion of key issues on the topics,
2. Short workshops on the topics ## 2-8 (30 minutes at the end of each session),
3. Participation in the round table on the topic # 10,
4. The home-work (examples of the use of different kinds of information search on the Internet),
5. Final written assignment.

 © Dr. Andrei Volodin, Runetica (web search and data retrievel).