helvitiis
commented
6 years ago @Jamielynn92 Jamie--Aaron and I continued to talk for about an hour after you left. If you have any questions or need any clarification on anything, please let me know! I can always find a time to meet with you and help walk you through anything if you'd like a more visual walkthrough rather than online direction.
Search Terms and Limiters for Finding Articles
Time Range
We’re looking for historical articles between 1880 and 1930, so making sure to limit your search timeframe will make (mostly) everything relevant to the period. While searching on some databases, even with date ranges active, you may still continue to get one or two articles that aren’t from the time period—so watch out for that!
Historical Figures
Searching specifically by name is very helpful toward pinpointing exactly what you need. There are some figures you can search simply by last name (i.e. "Tesla", "Edison") but there are others you may need to search by full name to specifically find the person and not the company (i.e. "George Westinghouse" and not "Westinghouse"). Play around with the search terms and see what works best for what you're looking for.
Article Type
If you're looking in a database, you should be able to limit the results by the type of text. We're looking for newspaper articles, journal articles, and even propaganda or advertising for or against the two current types. You'll want to take down the information of the publisher, author (if there's a listed author), sponsor (if you can find one), date of publication, and provide a URL so that we can come back to it later. You can find a template I made for us right here!
Places to Search
Here is a list of online resources we can search through to find what we need. When we find more, we'll add them here:
At some point, we may be incorporating modern articles to compare to historical articles. The Pitt Physics & Astronomy Database may help us with that when the time comes. We'll talk more about this on our next meeting Friday! For now, don't worry about using this.
We'll need to post the articles we find into the container folder I made specifically for this purpose. I have two folders in there, one labelled "AC" and the other "DC". If you find an article about (or pro-) AC current, please sort it into that folder, and vice versa with DC.
File Naming Convention for Uploading Articles to the Container:
Type = (JN - Journal) (NP - Newspaper) (AD - Advertising)
Date = (YYYY-MM-DD)
Example: NP1880-03-28.txt