Evaluate Research Sources & Digital Tools
One of my personal favorite experiences I had while at Seattle University was the access we were given to many different digital tools to work with. Being able to use different kinds of digital tool not only peaked my interest in the digital world but also opened up many avenues to research that I didn’t think was possible before.
In the course I took called Digital Rhetoric, we were given access to a tool called Issue Crawler. This tool worked by putting in website URL’s and you received a report back that showed all the linking that is done by the website. These linking could include where the website is citing their sources and who is citing this website as a source back. Seeing this side of websites and basing opinions and hypothesis on the rhetoric being used by the site to have a report come back as they did was extremely interesting to examine. Later on during my time in the program I took a course called Social Justice and Digital Media. Like the Digital Rhetoric course, we were also given access to digital tools in Social Justice that made working through the quarter very interesting. The tool that we used for this class was called Tawdis which is a website where you can put in the URL of another website and it will give you a full breakdown of the pages HTML and CSS. In the breakdown it gives you suggestions as to where there could be improvements made to the HTML or CSS in the website. This report may seem overwhelming for people who don’t have a background in web development but because I took the WATS web development course at Seattle University, I was really able to get a lot out of the report. After being able to use these tools, I feel like I have a stronger base as to how I would approach different analysis of websites. Websites in general can seem like a difficult medium to interact with and analyze but through these tools I feel much more confident with looking at websites on a deeper level. |