Trace information back to the original context
Let’s briefly revisit the last part of SIFT, which in this instance we didn’t need to use:
4. SIFT: TRACE claims, quotes, and media back to the original context.
Sometimes online information has been removed from its original context (for example, a news story is reported on in another online publication, or an online image is shared on Twitter). In those cases, TRACE the information back to the original source in order to recontextualize it.
In this instance we were already looking at research from Rational Wiki and Wikipedia. (If we had questions about those sources’ analyses, we could look at their citations and possibly at their practices for creating and editing content - see, for example, Wikipedia's Five Pillars. We could also look at additional sources from our search results list. But we’re not doing exhaustive research here, just enough to help us decide if a source appears trustworthy enough to be worth our time.
Image Credit: "Ibiza 2006 - Day 4: Footsteps / Tracking a Foy" by orangeacid is licensed under CC BY 2.0
CC-BY-NC-SA
This guide was created by Andrea Baer and Dan Kipnis at Rowan University and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA).
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