Rational – Assignment One

I chose to do option three for my assignment, my topic explores whaling, more specifically the origins of whaling, whaling today, and whaling in recent news. I decided my assignment will show both sides of the whaling epidemic but taking an overall stance against the issue. I decided to take a stance against the issue because I think that it is extremely cruel to slaughter whales, creatures that are endangered due to the overhunting that occurred in the past 50 years. I named my website ‘Against Whaling,’ to have a look click onto the previous link/the name of the website.
I decided to explore the background and origins of whaling to get a better grasp of the situation in relation to today. I took a close look at the Australian history of whaling, wanting a local perspective, but also trying to find reasons why we were once a whaling nation then quickly became a nation who is totally against whaling. I also took a close look into the Japanese history of whaling to help better understand the reasons why they continue to slaughter whales, reasons I believe are so they can continue their rich tradition of eating whale meat. I went onto explore whaling today, more specifically the scientific whaling that Japan is involved in, this was a necessity to be included on my website as it is something present today and often there are news articles about this issue. This naturally progressed into recent news about whaling; this of course involved Japan and the anti-whaling organisation known as Sea Shepherd. As you may remember these two groups were in the news early this year as tension heightened between the two, this tension almost exploding when a ship from each group collided with each other. I thought it wise at the time, the day before the due date, to explore anti whaling groups, this meant that more time would have to be spent on the project, but I thought that the bigger the variety of information on my site, the better mark I might possibly receive. I also decided to add another page the day the assignment was due, this might sound more dramatic then intended, because the page was a comment page, where people may express their opinions and thus was easy to construct.
In relation to the information on the pages, I wanted to get quotes from a wide variety of sources, some credible and some not so credible, so when it came time for my rational I had something to talk about. There was such rich information on the internet about whaling, it was a matter of sorting through the sites to find information that I wanted to include in my assignment. A good credible source that I used was an Australian government site, something that we can assume is correct as it is a government site, sure this may not always be the case, but most of the time the information would be factual. I found that a lot of sites had quotes from and links to the IWC (International Whaling Commission) site. This would have been a really good and credible source if it would actually let me access it without a login. Because I couldn’t access the site I had to instead find less credible sites and hope what they quoted from the IWC site was in fact correct and updated. When creating the IWC page, and listing the countries that are members of the commission, I had to reference Wikipedia, I assumed the information was correct as it would be hard to get this wrong, but I would be happy to be proven otherwise. Another problem I encountered was that when researching about Japanese whaling I continued to find sites that were in Japanese, and seeing that I only know one language there was no hope in me reading the information. So I had to see if there were English versions of the site, or hope that the information wasn’t to valuable. News sites were a great source to find information, whether it was about the Japanese’s reasons for scientific research, what is happening today in the Japanese whaling market or for finding information for the page dedicated to recent news.
It was good to read sites from all different opinions and perspectives, the Greenpeace site along with similar anti whaling sites were heavily biased against the reasons behind the Japanese scientific whaling, assuming quite harshly the reasons behind its existence and were liberally opposed to whaling of any sort. Meanwhile on the other spectrum, the Japanese sites that were dedicated about informing the world for their reasons for scientific whaling, were biased against anti whaling organisations labelling some groups as pirates and “eco-terrorists”. In my assignment I tried to get references from all types of sites to get a well rounded view on each group’s perspectives on whaling. I must admit that Wikipedia was a fairly good source because it presented all opinions about whaling which was written in an unbiased view, and it was only created as a resource and not to convince people of which side of the fence they should be living on. Wikipedia was also a good place to find images that were in the public domain and I could thus use on my website, most of the pictures on my site came from Wikipedia.
All in all the assignment was an eye opener to how bad whaling was and still is today. Of course I learnt many computer related things, I learnt how to work word press, got a better grasp on working with html and learnt how to find images that are not copy righted with the great site creative commons. But all these things that I learnt seem to be overshadowed by the huge problem of whaling, and I now feel a lot closer and protective over these great creatures.