IT and the Historian: Week 2, Searching the web

IT and the Historian:Week 2, Searching the web

Introduction

The idea this week is to get you used to using this Netscape. browser. At the end of the session you should have a good idea of how to use Netscape to browse the World Wide Web and have downloaded some pictures and files to your filespace (the F:\ drive) on the University PC cluster. You might also have edited a few pictures and text downloaded from elsewhere

The first thing you should do is to save this lesson as a Bookmark. Then you can always go back to it easily.

Begin by reading the entire document which supplies hints on how to use the browser. When you have finished go back to this page
Begin by looking at the Department of History home page and having a look at the Virtual History Department there.
When looking at the Virtual History Department, try selecting and then copying a couple of the biographies of members of staff. After you have selected a biography and copied it jump to the windows software text editor called Notepad and paste in your selected text with Ctrl-V. Save the text using File Save with an eight letter filename. Then jump back to Netscape.
Then search the internet using one of the robot search engines. This time lets look for an image or text relevant to one of the Approaches which form part of People and their history. So look for either a picture of The Great Wall of China, King Arthur, St. Augustine, Gandhi or Martin Luther King or even St. Margaret Thatcher or any other relevant person. Once you have an image or text you can save it to your filespace. If you have time, why not edit the picture you download? Use the Windows NT package Paintshop Pro to do this.

Some more hints on downloading and viewing images from the internet.

Firstly, note that when downloading images you must remember that some are very large. You have only 4Mb of filespace. Do not fill it up with too many of your favourite images.
Secondly, remember that when you download images, they must be saved to your F: drive.
Thirdly, you can insert any picture into Microsoft Word, using the menu Insert Picture command

There is a required assessment required for this weeks exercise. I want you to hand in to me on one page of A4 a downloaded picture of a person relevant to one of the approaches on the course People and their history. That page should include four or five line biography of the person concerned typed underneath the picture. Biographical details are often available on the Internet. Do not forget that you can Copy and Paste information from the web as well as download it. You should be able to copy text from Netscape into Word or into Notepad. Also remember to save your visited sites with bookmarks.

This simple assessment should be handed in to a course leader or Eleanor Cunningham by next Thursday. DO NOT FORGET TO PUT YOUR NAME AND E-MAIL ADDRESS ON THE PAPER. It will be marked according to quality of picture and text provided. How can you fail? Good luck.

Throughout the course you should NOT use electronic mail to send your course work to the course leader. It must be handed in, after printing out at a UCS printer station.

Back to the introductory page

If you have trouble with these tasks, try brushing up your basic windows skills. You can also try sticking your hand up in the class, when Jo Bath j.z.bath@ncl.ac.uk or myself if I am not on leave..j.p.boulton@ncl.ac.uk will help.