Hey I'm Ryan, one of your CWI librarians.
Let's apply the SIFT moves to an assignment you might actually write, to see which websites are worth more of your time.
Imagine you're asked to write a paper about immigration to the United States.
After you type some search terms into Google or DuckDuckGo, you see results
from groups with names like
American Immigration Council, Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Center for Immigration Studies.
None of their names seem very likely to be biased, do they?
It's not like you searched for
information about wolves in Idaho and you got back sources like
GoHunt.com or ProtectTheWolves.com
Those you'd be able to immediately see how they lean.
But with all the ones that we've just found, how can you tell what they're about?
Do you want to jump in and read each of them? That could take a long time.
So let's instead see how to do the SIFT move called "Investigate the Source."
Both Google and DuckDuckGo will show you a snippet of Wikipedia's entry about a source.
If there isn't an entry on Wikipedia, it might be too new or too small of an organization for there to be widespread consensus on how it fits into
an information context.
So unless you think that your professor will agree that you're an expert, it might be wise to work smarter, not harder, and use Wikipedia's evaluation as a starting point for your own.
Here's what Google shows for the American Immigration Council.
As you can see, in 2019 Google says that this organization advocates for immigrants to the United States and opposes US President Donald Trump's immigration policy.
Whether or not you agree with that position, this is a good context to keep in mind if you decide to read the American Immigration Council's site or to use it as a source.
Here's what Google shows for the Center for Immigration Studies.
Despite the innocent-sounding name of this organization, Google tells us that it was founded by John Tanton, a eugenicist and white nationalist. That's a very important context!
We should probably avoid using this as a source at all if we're trying to be responsible researchers who use sources that try to minimize their own biases.
What about the Federation for American
Immigration Reform (FAIR)?
Here's what we see from Google about it.
The preview snippet says that FAIR is an anti-immigration organization that tries to influence US immigration policies.
Let's go the extra step of looking it up on Wikipedia as well.
Maybe we can get more context from another couple sentences before reading
a whole lot on FAIR's own website.
Here's the Wikipedia entry as of July
2019.
As you can see, the next sentence beyond Google's snippet shows that FAIR was founded by John Tanton.
He's the same pro-eugenics white nationalist who started the Center for Immigration Studies.
Although this Wikipedia entry doesn't say that FAIR is as biased as the Center for Immigration Studies, the Wikipedia entry does mention that there's ongoing discussion over whether FAIR is a hate group.
Knowing that there's an ongoing controversy is an important context to know, whether or not you use this as a source.
If you want to research this further, the footnotes on Wikipedia's own entry would be a great place to start.
