There are a variety of ways to use the so-called information super-highway for your research to study international relations. With increased graphic capabilities, information processing speed and transfer rates, accessing the World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming easier and more friendly. We present several ways of utilizing this new and exciting resource to demonstrate the utility of this new resource. Using three examples to illustrate INTERNET as information, we hope to convince you of the importance of this new resource. These examples are meant to be evocative, not exhaustive, and of course we appreciate your comments.More general introductions to the world wide web may be found at a variety of sources including:
General searches may also be undertaken using,
But for the moment, let's show you how to use the web for a gaining access to more information about world politics. For example, say you were interested in the May 1995 Clinton/ Yeltsin summit in Moscow, how would you find out more about it? One place to begin is the White House homepage located at U.S. White House. Follow the Publications link to Retrieve Documents (forms index), where you can use a variety of search techniques to narrow down the choices. Follow the instructions for narrowing down the search (note that the database begins in January 1993). If you select Former USSR under Geographic Region, and 3-17 May 1995, you will find (at least 27 documents, including) the full text of Clinton's press conference with Yeltsin, an address to Moscow State University students, a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Kuchma, as well as a speech about V-E Day delivered at Fort Myers just before he left Washington. The 1995 State of the Union address is also located here. Note that "40 documents" and "January 1993 to November 1996" (that is, Clinton's first term dates) are the default choices for this search engine. These can be changed on the Forms index checklist.
If you wanted to find out about the disposition of the nuclear weapons in Ukraine (one of the talking points between Clinton and Kuchma) you could repeat the search with the forms index, in order to see how the subject was addressed, at least publicly. But let's step away from "the official US perspective" and try a different approach. The University of Pittsburgh's WWW Virtual Library known as ianWeb (copyrighted) located at ianWeb is another good place to check. One could follow the Think Tanks link to the SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) homepage ( SIPRI) to find summaries of chapters from the SIPRI yearbooks. The summary for Chapter 8, Nuclear Weapons Developments, (Nukes) is one link of interest. A link to the United States Institute of Peace Gopher (USIP) may also be found here. To find out more about Ukraine, go back to the ianWeb homepage and follow National Governments link to Country Studies/ Area Handbook Program, where you can find a link to Ukraine's gopher server located at Ukrania.
The OnLine INtelligence Project (OLIN) homepage can be found at OLIN. OMRI's (Open Media Research Institute) Daily Digest is available through email subscription and also via this WebServer: it includes news items about Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Note that goes back only to January 1995. Also part of project OLIN is a link to the REESWeb (Russian and East European Studies Internet Resources, located at REESWeb which has collected various pointers to other on-line information services. For current news sources, one place to check is back at the top of ianWeb, by following links to news sources, including some not-so-ordinary, located at ianWeb. Here one can find links to CNN (Cable News Network), Radio Free Liberty/ Radio Europe archives, Deutsche Welle (German news service), a Slovak news server, and others. Finally, the homepage at Ukraine has pointers to a huge number of data sources on Ukraine, some in English, some in Russian, and some in Ukrainian.
Finally, there are a million and one news groups that you can gain access to through your browser. Many of them have a high noise to signal ratio, but there is interesting and valuable stuff out there. Like most things valuable, you have to search carefully for it, however. A small sampling of four specific news groups can be found in:
Happy sailing.