Subject :
Internet: ferramenta d'investigació lite Gr.SG (28034) 2006-07
Student´s name :
Gutierrez Campos, Marta Maria
Title of the paper :
"An Exploration of the Influences of Don Miguel de
Cervantes
"
Author or topic :
Cervantes, Miguel de
Abstract :
Don Quixote, by poet, playwright and
novelist Don Miguel de Cervantes’ is oft-cited as one of the best novels
ever written and a major influence on Western writers, including William
Shakespeare. While his influence on Western Literature is often commented
upon, this website will explore ways in which Cervantes himself was influenced,
by other writers as well as by the time in which he lived, preceded by an
overview of Cervantes in order to give some idea of his life.
Criteria and Search Methods
My criteria for selecting which web pages to include in my website include:
1)
The date of publication. Earlier postings will not include the latest figures
and research. While this is a consideration, it is not necessarily a problem
as some comments on Cervantes will hold true regardless of whether it was
made in the last ten years or not.
2)
The purpose of the webpage is also an important consideration ie whether
or not it matches my intention to explore, persuade or define. It was also
important to understand whether the webpage was intended for students or
for the general public and for the most part I have included such pages that
were intended for study as opposed to general sites and sites that gave biographies
of Cervantes, as this was not appropriate for my website. One of the difficulties
encountered in this respect, was that many otherwise appropriate sites on
Cervantes, which delved into topics in some depth, were written in Spanish,
thus making them inappropriate for this webpage. Still more websites required
the user to make a purchase in order to acquire full texts on the subjects.
3)
I have included pages that list their sources, as this gives some idea as
to the accuracy of the webpage, marking the difference between comment or
opinion and researched hypotheses.
4)
I discounted message boards and forums, such as
http://mobydicks.com/lecture/Cervanteshall/wwwboard.html
as the qualifications
of the authors were unclear, there was a lack of quoted sources and posts
were often off topic.
Each page was assessed with regard to the implied/intended audience. Although
many search techniques were used, looking through directories and following
indirect links, the pages selected were found using direct links from search
engines Alta Vista, Yahoo and Google, within the first 7 pages of search
results.
Although the purpose of each page was seldom explicit, I found it possible
to infer a purpose from the way in which the text was presented, for example
whether the text was dense and accompanied by annotations and notes, which
suggests serious research and criticism, as opposed to sites that sported
many bright colours and pictures, which suggest (but does not mean entirely)
a site intended for information and perhaps topics explored in less depth.
The web address also gave clues as to the nature of the page, for example
an address featuring the ‘.edu’ domain immediately suggests a school, college,
university of other educational facility. Similarly, ‘.org’ implies a not-for-profit
organisation or charity that may be presenting information for its own sake,
and ‘.com’ implies (but again does not mean) a there may be a commercial
aspect to the site and that the user may be asked to part with funds at some
point whilst viewing the website.