Search Findings – Rachel Denning
Writings that emerged during or after the apartheid era in South Africa have been some of the most moving and thought provoking works I have ever read. It is my firm belief that students need to be challenged through the texts that they read in school. The works should be challenging in the writing as well as in the content. I used several search engines to explore the apartheid movement in literature.
The first engine I used was google.com which is my usual default for research. I used several phrases including “apartheid in literature”, “apartheid novels”, “apartheid writings”, “novels and apartheid”. Each of these searches resulted in articles or reviews about writings of apartheid in South Africa. These were great sources that provided background information about history of the time as well as interviews with authors. If a teacher were searching for authors or texts to investigate, Google will provide a lot of help, but as far as in-depth analysis of actual writings it did not yield it. The best way to go about this search would be to find names of novels, or poems and then to search individually for those specific texts.
Using the search engine of bbc.com and the same phrases as above, I found some of the same articles that Google brought up. However, I found more sites that discussed actual texts that included apartheid storylines. There were sites that took a specific piece of writing and explained in detail the significance of the story and the accuracy it had to the actual history. What I found was that the results based on different search phrases did not vary much. With the four different phrases, BBC brought up basically the same sites. This could be helpful if I found exactly what I needed on the first run, but if I was not finding specific enough results the lack of variation would be frustrating.
The third search engine I used was ask.com and I found that to be very similar to Google and better than BBC. The engine brought up many of the same articles that Google found, but it also found direct links to books which could or not could not be helpful.
What I realized through this is that my search techniques have much to be improved upon. There are so many ways to search for information on the web and in order to find the sites I want, I have to search in a specific way using specific phrases. Searching the internet effectively is a skill I need to work on as I move farther towards my career. There are so many great resources on the internet; I need to learn the best way to find them.
