Cabrillo College Library

What's on this page

• Reviews
• Evaluating Web resources
• Semiotics and Stereotyping
• Style guides
• Transferring an Image
• Share Your Thoughts
• Getting to This Page

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Before we get started --

1. Go to the Web page for this class -- from the Cabrillo College Library homepage, click on Internet Links, then select English, then scroll down, and under Course-Related Materials, click on ENGL 2 Cowan.
2. Make this page a Favorite. Click on Favorites at the top of your screen, then click on Add. Now, you can get back to this page easily by going to Favorites.

Rules of the Road -- 1) You can take notes on this handout. Or, you can open a Word document and take notes that way. 2) We like to support your research up here in the classroom, so we allow you to print while you are here with your class for free -- but no more than about 20 pages per person.

Reviews  published in periodicals -- Use Academic Search Premier, which provides access to articles published in about 8,000 periodicals since about 1990. For most of those periodicals, full text copies of the articles are in the database.

1. From the Cabrillo College Library homepage, click on Full Text Articles
2. On the next screen, under General (on the left), click on Academic Search Premier
3. On the next screen, click on     With the Advanced search screen, you can most efficiently search more than one term at a time.
   
4. Click on the little box next to the word Full text to limit your search to fulltext articles on the database.
   
   
5. Type in your search terms -- i.e., the name of your film -- and hit Search.

From the results list, click on the article title to get to the screen with more information. Note here if you found a review for your film, where it was published, and if it's extensive enough to be helpful:

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Academic Search Premier has a nifty email feature.  Try it out!

To find reviews published in Newspapers, use Proquest Newspapers

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage
2. Click on Full Text Articles
3. Under News, over on right, click on Proquest Newspapers

   Look for a review of your movie and make notes about what you find:

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   You can also email these articles to yourself.

Reviews for "classic" films, and for movies released and reviewed in the last fifteen years or so, are available on the Web.

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage.
2. Click on Internet Links
3. Then click on Film

There are a number of Web sites that offer reviews. The Internet Movie Database is the most extensive, but you'll probably want to explore all the Web sites listed under General Websites -- especially Rotten Tomatoes, and, under Specific Aspects, look at Movie Review Query Engine (MBQE).

Note here if you found a review for your film, which Web site it's at, and if it's extensive enough to be helpful:

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Find Reviews via Google -- Google will help you find movie reviews published on the Web. Since anyone (pretty much) can publish on the Web, it's important to evaluate what you find.

Some reviews out on the Web to evaluate together

MRQE || Qwipster's || ThePost ||

Google is developing a movie database! Type the word movie: with a colon and then the title of your film. Voila!

Since July 2007, when you do a Web search using Google, it does what it calls "a universal search." It searches several of its databases simultaneously. If it finds sufficient resources in, say, its books database, or its periodical articles database (which is called Scholar) or its video database, it will alert you, as in this search:

Try Google to find reviews of your film! Did you find some useful reviews?

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You need to check with your instructor during your search for critiques and reviews to see if she will accept the film you are thinking of writing about.

Information about semiotics and stereotypes

To get good background information on stereotyping:

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage
2. Click on Full Text Articles
3. Click on XReferPlus under Encyclopedias/Background Information (center column)

Here's a sample search for information about stereotyping in the movies. Note how I have used the asterisk ( * ) to truncate the word stereotype so I get stereotype, stereotypes, stereotyping, etc.

There are also books available at Google books. Go to books.google.com. Here are some:

Latino Images in Film || Media and Minorities || America on Film || Media Semiotics

With Google Books, you are sometimes blocked from reading the entire book online (there's a publishers' suit which is yet to be resolved). The Cabrillo College Library has whole books online that you can read. To get to them:

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage
2. Click on Full Text Articles
3. Under General (top left), click on NetLibrary E-Books

Here are good Web resources for semiotics and stereotypes -- Semiotics for Beginners Stereotypes -- Race and Ethnicity

Sol Worth's classic book Studying Visual Communication (edited, with an Introduction, by Larry Gross, 1981) is online, along with its illustrations.  Scroll down to where the illustrations are listed. Here are some really interesting ones about the process of communication: Ideal model || Probable model

Style Guides -- how to cite the resources you use -- are posted to the Library's Internet Links page  

You can probably find an image directly related to your movie. Here's how to do that:

1. Go to the search engine Google
2. As the default, Google is set to search the Web. Click on Images to get into its image database
3. Type in the name of your film. If it has more than one word, be sure to put the full name in quotation marks, e.g., "Pay It Forward." Then hit the Enter key or click on Google Search

Now that you have an image, here's how to insert it into a Word document:

1. Open a Word document -- Start -> Word (if you don't already have one open)
2. Click on the bottom task bar to go back to the Web page with your image.
3. Right click on the image. Scroll down to Copy.
4. Bring up your Word document. Position your cursor to where you want your image to be. Paste the picture (File ->Paste; or use Ctl V)
5. Under or near the image, type the word Source and include the title of the Web site and its URL. You can write next to and below the image. To put text around the image -- click on the image, go to Format -> Picture. Click on Layout tab, and select the wrapping format you want.

Other good places to find images: Corbis and GettyImages. Want to see if the trailer for your movie is available? Go to Blinkx -- the largest site for videos on the Internet.

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage    <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu>
2. Click on Internet Links
3. Click on English and then on Course-Related Materials
4. Click on ENGL 2, Composition and Critical Thinking, K. Cowan

K. Cowan; T. N. Smalley 
last rev. 11/07