Comments on: Anatomy of a Search

By: djganddfg@aol.com

djganddfg@aol.com — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 19:38:04 +0000

Hi I may be the break you are looking for… I am your wife’s 3rd cousin based on what you posted here. Spiro was married to Maria we know they had two children Irene (My great grandmother) and a brother. Irene had three kids Mary, Michael and Catherine. Only Mary is still alive. Catherine had one Daughter Pamela and 4 years ago when my grandmother passed I inherited all the Greek family items. I have a copy of the statue, a book about him, a few family photos (Which I am taking pictures of if you want them). Spiro’s wife’s Maiden name is Tsougari.

I hope this helps because I have been looking for information on him too. It would be great for us to discuss this. I would love to share these family items with you.

By: Carl

Carl — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:04:28 +0000

Just wanted to join the pigpile of praise. Great post, really illuminating. The tricky bit is the “you have to know a few things already” – implied is a whole cultural substrate enabling a first cut from the impossible everything to the manageable something, that lots of students don’t have and can’t be easily backfilled.

By: Chris Segal

Chris Segal — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:43:26 +0000

Very vivid example, and well narrated.

I like the idea of working through online searches in class. Have you had much success with it as a pedological technique?

More journal war stories, but I’ve been thinking about how and if good searching techniques can be taught. I have pretty good instincts for writing searches, in google or westlaw or wherever, and I sometimes find myself just doing research for someone because I know that I can quickly find the source we need. Is this (relative) ability innate or learned? Is it based on my somewhat long experience with the internet? I have no idea, but I wonder.

By: benjamin

benjamin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:09:21 +0000

I had the sinking feeling that at the end of this post you were going to write: “6) Don’t trust everything you read. Every link that I’ve posted here I fabricated. Gotcha!”

In all seriousness, I think this post sheds great light on how to search fruitfully. Thanks for the insight.

By the way, any thoughts on Google Wave?

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:51:40 +0000

I think that’s the point at which I arrived when I found the .gr domain site dedicated specifically to the man himself. Just looking at it, it’s clear that there’s some works in Greek that study the incident, Cretan nationalism or the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, and I suspect that the name in Greek would turn up a bunch more Greek language sites. I think I could find a keyboard translator for Greek easily enough.

By: andrew

andrew — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:41:27 +0000

This is a fascinating post; I don’t think online search strategies get nearly enough attention. However, I’m curious: did you ever consider trying to transliterate the surname (back) into Greek?

I’ve done that with Cyrillic for Russian – my Russian is very rusty, but passable enough for searches – and had some luck finding things that the English transliteration wasn’t turning up. It does raise the problem of finding sites you can’t read, but a little luck with automated translators or mixing alphabets in the search box and sometimes it works out. Of course, this requires a way to render other alphabets – I know of online “keyboards” that will do Cyrillic but would have to search for something that would do Greek.

By: librarygrrrl

librarygrrrl — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:52:04 +0000

Brilliant recounting of your adventure. I’m going to share this with my colleagues here at Wellesley, who I know will find it incredibly helpful as they work with students at this end-of-semester crunch time.