The Watsons Go to Birmingham, con'd.

Focus on Internet Research con'd Racial or ?

Pastor Upton found painted on smoldering door, "Die Nigger Die!" and "White Is Right." How can it be denied that racial hate is a factor? An AP story that's repeated in several spots No longer archived here.

http://www.afroam.org/information/national/church.html

Relate any of these on-line news stories to Paul Simon's song, Burn Down the Mission.

"The Black Experience" is a popular use group, a forum for readers to exchange points of view. Check out the Mailing List Archives for some thoughtful commentaries.

http://www.goodstuff.prodigy.com/lists/blackexperience/date.html

The URL below will call up a letter from this "Black Experience List" which eloquently describes a burned-out inner city church in Richmond, Va. The author continues to lament such losses, speculate on motivation and includes a commentary relating racial hate to anti-Semitism.

http://www.goodstuff.prodigy.com/lists/blackexperience/0108.html

Further discussions may be found at

http://web-cr01.pbs.org/newshour/bb/race_relations/church_burnings_6-10a.html

Comments on the Black Church Burnings Update

An open community discussion focuses on important issues: this week's question was "Has media coverage of Black church arson promoted a copycat effect or is the increase due to a larger conspiracy?" Read here comments from a firefighter, calls for unity, and a suggestion that it may be a conspiracy originating from the Nation of Islam to ignite the African American population.

This news story mentions that both white and black churches have been hit.

Consider:
What is the responsibility of the media in reporting this type of crime? At this US News site, your students will read an opinion concerning a worry that news stories only serve to fuel the fires - literally. The suggestion here is that ordinary people, of course, know that burning buildings is wrong but news stories about arson only serve to incite "the pathological fringe" rather than deter them.

Does the term "community" mean something different in the electronic age?

How does the medium of "e-mail" enhance or detract from a person expressing his or her opinion in a format such as this? What does syntax and grammar possibly say about a writer? Who writes a more persuasive message? Why?

This use group usually lists not only the person's e-mail address but their registered name? Why? What are the benefits?

Racial or religious hatred? Does it matter what's causing the rash of burnings?

My research also pulled up a company called the "Burning Churches Enterprises for the Morally Challenged." From here a net user could order a t-shirt with "I sin for a living " on the front and its logo of a burning church on the back. Will this page be considered "cool" by your students or will they express outrage? It may provide a fine example of free speech expression. What age students might you use it with in a discussion about anti-social actions?

An angle that comparative religion students might pursue is that the black church burnings are one of the symbols that the New World Order is coming. Compare this viewpoint with the historical ones under the section "Nothing New?"

What's being done?

News Service National & International Religion Report 1996-MAY-27 reports that a House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on May 21 concerning the rash of church burnings in the United States. (25 arson attacks so far in 1996 and the National Council of Churches set the blame squarely on "white hate groups". ) The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have 100 agents in each division studying the crimes. (By the way, the URL below is Religious News:, is an excellent place to bookmark as it strives for multi-religious understandings.)

Teens put their hands and hearts where their mouths were by assisting in the physical rebuilding of some of the churches.:

http://wp1.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1996-06/30/111L-063096-idx.html

Many of the pages listed here are positive and upbeat. But of course that is only one side. Workers World (under the title: 50,000 March for affirmative Action) report that pastors are being made to feel like criminals by the investigating agents and that the government is taking little action. On a CNN news report (June 11) Rev. Mac Charles Jones of the National Council of Churches calls for blacks to defend themselves and their churches by any means needed. This page also points seriously (with only suggested evidence) at a conspiracy theory not only by the Klan but also suggest real estate and political campaign manipulations.

Consider:
How does rapid "publishing" or dissemination of the news make a societal difference?

Copyright issues abound. This page also contains a note that reprinting is allowed if the source is properly identified. Another page carries the caveat: "PLEASE CONTACT THE CENTER ...BEFORE REPRINTING THIS DOCUMENT IN WHOLE OR IN PART." Another site includes this footnote:
" All Contents © Copyright 1996 Lexington Herald-Leader. All Rights Reserved "

Check your school Homepages to ascertain that the material used has proper copyright notices on it. Conduct a survey of 10 schools to see what they are done relating to this issue. As a method of evaluating your research, write a report, deliver to your school committee and ask them for feedback.

"Rebuild the Churches" is an activist link to reconstruct the buildings. A phone number is included in case a reader have suspicious information to impart to the authorities.

Other rebuilding sites: Burned Black Churches Project:

Coming Together in the Heart of Dixie

USA Today enjoys a wide reputation for presenting statistics. Use the tables on this site to graph the amount of insurance coverage that could be applied to these damaged churches. Categorize the suspects and graph them. Check this page often for changes and updates. Track and chart arrests and convictions.

The Center for Democratic Renewal suggests that there are complicating issues. One example they give relates the experience of the burning of the Jerusalem Branch Baptist Church in Aiken, South Carolina (June 6, 1994). The fire department listed the cause as electrical yet the insurance company's investigation turned up arson. To date the federal government has not initiated a serious look at it.

REWARD OFFERED IN CHURCH ARSON: "An attack on any church, any synagogue, or any house of worship is an attack upon the entire faith community and it can not and will not be tolerated," Ralph Reed, Executive Director of the Christian Coalition said today in a news conference denouncing the burning of 23 Black churches in the southern sector of the Unites States. He announced that the Christian Coalition will pay a 25 thousand dollar reward for information about these acts of arson.
This site no longer accessible.

Perhaps the research hook for some students might be the page about NFL players donating money to torched black churches. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story about the Green Bay Packers' attempt to raise millions of dollars for rebuilding churches. Unfortunately to read the original article you need to subscribe to the newspaper. (The archived version is available at the above site.) Interlibrary loan suggests an option for the librarian and the interested student. They may wish to search local papers near the same publication date. (Who says librarians aren't needed if the school has the internet!)

At the site below, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) office provides an excellent list for churches to use while assessing church vulnerability to arson and bombing attacks. A profile of the most hit churches as well as a set of Affirmative Actions to Reduce Vulnerability are given here.

http://www.ustreas.gov/treasury/bureaus/atf/t03txt.html

PART III - REFLECTING ON NET RESEARCH

Unfortunately, there is an worrisome attitude circulating: "Our school has internet access now - why do we need a librarian?" Regardless of all the other things we do, librarians generally are experienced in search strategies and should be able to apply these strategies to internet searching. One graphic rebuttal to this type of statement might be to get the administrator on the World Wide Web and ask him or her to find some specific information. Most novices are surprised and frustrated to find that navigating the internet is far more challenging than expected. They find a diverse, chaotic and decentralized tangle of information. Assistance is much more welcome after a frustrating voyage.

A concept that has great ramifications when using the internet is the difference between recall and precision:.

RECALL: has all or most of the relevant information been recalled?

PRECISION: is all the found material considered relevant? For example, some of the Web pages with the best information were not found using the first two sets of key words! "Recall" effectiveness is based on the quality in understanding of search terms. Other problems with recall involve the amount of data returned. One of the best sites I found upon researching church arson came last on a list generated by my third try key words following 94 other places. Ninety-four "hits" are a reasonable number to work with but frankly, many people don't get to the bottom of the list. The number of internet hosts tripled in the past year, certainly it's easy to contemplate not staying with a search through the third priority list. (See Gray: "Measuring the Growth of theWeb"

l). "Precision" issues emerge due to homonyms, idioms, multiple uses of works and rewording of phrases. For example Lycos recalled a site on black and white physiography "Bill's Burning Man" and "Evaluation of Carbon Black Slurries as Clean Burning Fuels."

Relevance has a great deal to do with the method of categorizing webpages. (There are no master catalogers on the internet.) Some services (Lycos) index the first 100 words while some "look at" the whole page (InfoSeek and AltaVista). And what about the term "best," as in the phrase that search engines often use: "'best' sites are listed first"? Who selects the best? They may be determined by the number of times the requested word is found on an entire webpage or by the location related to beginning or end of the page. Some search engines summarize the pages; some merely repeating the first few lines or by pulling out "key statements" with the document itself.

Just as we learned which dictionaries in our collections include foreign terms within the body of the work and which contain a separate listing we will need to have a clear understanding of how the major search engines work. Here are a few examples that illuminate the scope of the searching problem:

To find words that are close to each other in: - AltaVista under Advanced Search and the conjunction NEAR. This will recall separate words if they are within ten words of each other. - In Infoseek use brackets to find words within 100 words of each other. Lycos doesn't allow searches for numbers but many other search engines do.
Some recommend using only lower case letters (AltaVista) while others (infoseek) suggest capitalizing proper names.
Several search engines expect words that need to be part of a phrase to be in quotes and some ask the user to put hyphens between them.
A search on "black church NEAR arson" pulled up 17 pages while a search on "black churches NEAR arson" found 21. Therefore it's a good idea to teach students how to use the "wild card search" technique": type in the keyword "church*" This will recall church, churches and other words with church as the root.
Some search engines allow Query-by-example while others don't. The theory here is to find the best hits for your information needs and request similar pages or files. For example, Infoseek adds to the recall list an option called "Similar Pages" so that Dole as a political candidate can be separated from the fruit company.

There are a variety of other types of problems incurred during a search.

Even novices know that some servers will be down for repair, are backing up or are unavailable due to heavy use. One search netted me the frustration of finding the 8 of the first 10 apparently relevant sites had "no data available on server!" Perseverance pays off; the net user who is not willing to invest some learning time will most probably leave in frustration.

When working with students we've all heard the wail, "There isn't anything here!" Upon further investigation, we find that they have misspelled the keyword. However, as an experiment, I entered the misspelling "white AND supremecy" [sic] in AltaVista and 23 sites were returned. Most likely a student would think that they had found what they were seeking and not ask for help.

About one in ten of the returned sites on another search were links to talk shows or to specific news articles which cannot be accessed without paying a fee. Taylor Subscription Talk was one such service that charged $10 for 10 hours of "listening" time. The readers could choose from a long list of broadcast topics but to order took 2 weeks.

Scrolling through some of the long lists was time consuming as the relevance to the church burnings was not always obvious. I was tempted to give up on it. But when the search probed "deeper" into the links first suggested, the rewards were quite good. This is where thinking skills strategies need to be stressed. Only by associating very general topics (e.g. Racial Hatred) with the specific topic (Black Church Burnings) was I able to find productive links.

Originally I thought that the key words "black," "African-American" or "Afro-American" were crucial in my search on church arson. However, one government web page which was rated "low confidence" included the general profile of victim churches and a list of how to prevent violence. There were no references to race in it all but it supplied excellent information.

Result lists are artificially expanded when newsgroups are included. (Note, these personal opinions can provide fruity and divergent points of view.) Some messages are returned only because the keyword is found in "next " and "previous message." Be sure you and your students know how to follow a thread . (A thread is the chain of response messages that contain or address the same topic or subject. They are made by "replying" to a message in newsgroup.

This example began using AltaVista's Advanced Search Form. It's the favorite engine of many educators.

To get to the Advanced Search option, click on the words "Advanced Search" Alta Vista also contains an excellent HELP section with explanation of their searching terms , helpful tips, and FAQs - well worth a visit.

Recent research shows that students at all levels experience major difficulties in identitying key words and designing Boolean searches, expecially on the internet. (see Hahl and Harada (1996) "Composing Boolean search statements: Self confidence, concept analysis, search logic and errors." School Library Quarterly 24 (2). 199-207.) For instance, students get frustrated when they type NOT while searching in Alta Vista. Their term is AND NOT.

While these activites on The Watsons Go to Birmingham are intended to make suggestions for teaching internet research and on using some assessment techniques that may be new to you, PLEASE remember that these are merely starting points. As in all these guides, this is not photocpy-ready material. Instead we suggest that you start with some suggestions and ideas and adapt them to your needs and the knowledge and developmental levels of students. You might also wish to use this as a model for expanding on a TV news story, textbook chapters, a magazine article or even another fictional work. These are exciting times. Let's make the best use of our intenet connections!

Back to beginning of article

December 1997
Maine Educational Media Associaton

Previous Section . . . . SPRINGBOARD's Table of Contents. . . . Next Section