Your topic may change as you continue your research and learn new things, so it is always a good idea to find more sources than your assignment states as required. You should choose the best information that addresses your topic of everything you've found. How do you do that? You have to SIFT through it, as described below.
Once you've found some information that you think will be helpful for your research, you need to figure out if the information is credible and relevant, which will help you decide how you will use it. In other words, you have to evaluate your information. There are four moves you should make when you are evaluating information.
The first move is pretty easy. Use the word stop to remind you of two things.
You want to know what you're reading before you read it. How do you do that? Just take a minute to find our where the information is coming from before you start reading, so you can decide whether it's worth your time. Knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of what they say. So ask yourself some of these questions:
Many times when you find something interested, you want to know if it's true or false. You can't just use the first thing you find to figure that out. For example, if you get an article that says koalas have just been declared extinct from the Save the Koalas Foundation, your best bet might not be to investigate the source, but to go out and find the best source you can on this topic, or, just as importantly, to scan multiple sources and see what the expert consensus seems to be. In these cases we encourage you to “find other coverage” that better suits your needs — more trusted, more in-depth, or maybe just more varied.
Do you have to agree with the consensus once you find it? Absolutely not! But understanding the context and history of a claim will help you better evaluate it and form a starting point for future investigation.
Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. Maybe there’s a video of a fight between two people with Person A as the aggressor. But what happened before that? What was clipped out of the video and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real but the caption could be misleading. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a research finding — but you’re not certain if the cited research paper really said that.
In these cases we’ll have you trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in it’s original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented.
This page is an adaptation of SIFT (The Four Moves) (on HAPGOOD) by Michael Caulfield and is used under a CC BY 4.0 International license.