It must be a hectic and exciting time for Steve Waters, Homerton College’s Director of Studies in Drama. His new play, World Music has just finished a month’s run in London’s Donmar Warehouse theatre (41 Earlham Street, London, WC2H 9LX, tel: 02 072 404 882).
World Music is about the troubled and bloody relationship between Africa and Europe, and how it affects the personal lives and loves of two generations. It draws from the troubled history of Central Africa to show how the deeds of the past contaminate our hopes for the future. The book of the script is available to buy - its cover is shown here.
Steve wrote an article in The Guardian last week, and the play was scheduled for discussion on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves [Tuesday 17 February] - but unfortunately I missed it! Did anyone tape it?
World Music has already premiered last year in Sheffield - students and staff from Homerton went to that performance. There was a coach trip to the London production the other day. Library staff went to see it. Despite my prior expectations of a ‘political’ play, I totally enjoyed it. I was particularly impressed by the ‘natural’ way in which the characters spoke and interacted. The focus on individuals’ lives made the ‘politics’ palatable.
The play received a mixture of fairly positive reviews. This review in The Independent on Sunday was particularly complimentary. Steve has donated copies of the book of the play script to the Library. We have put up a display in the Library to celebrate Steve’s achievement and to revisit the events that World Music seeks to remind us of.
Google, the web search engine, is rumoured to be planning a float onto the US stockmarket. It was even rumoured that Google turned down a purchase offer from Bill Gates at Microsoft! The search engine company has never confirmed that it will float. However, speculation has been rife for months that the company will launch an ‘initial public offering’ (IPO) this spring, which could value it at £10bn-£15bn (about the size of British Telecom, for instance).
Google claims to index over 4.2 billion web pages, making it the search engine with the widest overall coverage of the web. Even so, it is claimed this is merely the tip of the iceberg, and most of the web is ‘hidden’ from traditional search engines: this is the so-called ‘deep web’. More on that another day.
Google has become the most popular search engine - even amongst researchers in academia. Indeed, it has one of the internet’s most visited websites overall. But are you using it in the most effective way? Google, itself, has useful pages of search tips. And there is this recent article in The Guardian.
Still not finding what you want? Some of the ‘new generation’ search engines are worth trying out. Vivísimo is a ‘meta search engine’, which means that it does not have its own index of web pages, but runs searches across a selection of search engines and de-duplicates the results. Vivísimo then ‘clusters’ the results on the fly into similar groups which can help to tease out the main themes within the search subjectstructure your ideas about a subject.
Teoma, is supposed to be so good, but I am not particularly impressed. In addition to listing the results, it will also suggest high quality web resources and provide tips on narrowing your search.
Then there’s Turbo10, another meta search engine, which actually does search the ‘deep web’. You can choose up to ten ‘deep net’ search engines per search (out of over 2,000!). An interesting venture, if somewhat dull looking web site.
Another worthy and (in my opinion) to-be-supported venture is the dmoz open directory project search, part of a growing movement towards free open access information and open source software.
Also we’ve got Renardus (after the fox - cunning!). an EU-funded search project claiming to pick out high quality European educational internet resources - makes a change from the US-oriented nature of much of the internet.
You must check out KartOO. The name’s weird already, but this has to be the strangest search engine yet. A fish-like creature swims around the screen a bit, then you get your results. They are displayed visually with lines connecting similar websites. It takes some getting used to. This visual connecting thing is becoming fashionable - but more about that another day. I was hoping to see ‘Fishy’ some more, but maybe I had one too many coffees today.
Well, I’m sure you get the idea. Why not bang out a quick search on Google for ’search engines’?
STOP PRESS: The 4th Annual Search Engine Watch Awards have been announced. Seems that Google is still king in most areas…
And don’t forget the University Library Electronic Resources website! You can be sure of quality information if you use that - it should be a common research tool. But I’ll leave that for another day. Now, let’s just take another peek at KartOO…
