The Boolean Trim

Boolean. Boolean Logic. Oy.

Sounds like a good way to go in principle: adding "AND" (for words and word combinations you want included together in articles), "OR" (for words that you'd want at least one or the other in articles) and "NOT" (for things you don't want in your articles at all) to your key search words in order to narrow and focus your search results down to the most relevant possible selection. The concept behind it definitely seems like it would cut down on research time and also get you the most useful articles for answering whatever your research question is. Of course... things are never as simple as they seem at first glance.

Myself, I've never really used it before this class, but this attempt at using it for my podcast was entirely unsuccessful. It could just be because it took some chipping away at my research question to get it as tight as it needed to be while still leaving room to explore, but all that Boolean Logic did for me was trim down article content to unhelpfully tiny selections of information, and largely not even in the direction I was looking to go. No number of "AND"s, "OR"s, or "NOT"s could steer my searches to the right information stream, and I only made real progress after I abandoned using them all together, and stuck with broad-concept searches.

Will I use it again?...Yikes. Maybe, but only if I can find someone who's good at it who's willing to give me some sort of tutorial on how to use it productively.