Computer Assisted Research- What did I learn?

My experience of using spread sheets to probe crime statistics has been very enlightening. I started the exercise with the belief that everything can be found on the internet with ease, and I have finished the exercise with the knowledge that this is not always the case. The crime statistics were fairly easy to find at first, as it was merely a matter of looking on the “saps.gov” site and finding the 2006 statistics for each area. However, my first stumbling block came when I couldn’t find the stats for Bloemfontein. Jude hinted that Bloemfontein had undergone a name change, and so I found the new name (Mangaung) and was eventually able to find the stats. I also battled with finding detailed population statistics for each of the cities in the exercise, until Galen figured it out. It was a matter of finding the “Data supplied to the National Treasury”, and then finding the municipality codes needed to decode this document. Once I had all the statistics, it was fairly easy to use the information to work out the per capita rates and to create charts. I realised in the duration of the exercise that the task which I had expected to be easiest (finding the information), was in fact the most difficult. I do not believe that the information was intentionally hidden, rather, I believe that it was difficult to find due to a lack of organization on the site. I had assumed that vital statistics - such as population statistics - would be easily accessible on the internet, due to the obvious importance of these figures. This exercise has shown me that the internet is always the “font of all knowledge” that one assumes, and that sometimes one must resort to traditional sources, or some very creative thinking, in order to find that information that one needs.