Feature - Researching to Add Richness

[chomiji]

Sometimes, you're writing nothing but a blistering hot love scene, or a character study, or a drabble. In those cases, your canon is all you'll want or need. But there are other times - Yuletide, a Big Bang, your own original novel-in-progress, that sprawling AU epic that's been taking up all your spare imagination for weeks - when you're going

Comments

[campylobacter]

Good points about using Wikipedia to snatch good search terms, and expanding online search to include foreign languages.

I agree that nothing compares to a human interpreter! Although I find Google Translate to be easier to use than Babelfish. Google Translate automatically detects what language you've pasted into the box, and can let you hear how it's pronounced. For languages that don't use the Roman alphabet, there's a transliteration option so that you can see a phonetic representation.
http://translate.google.com

For hard core research, or when you need technobabble for a character who's a scientist or "legalese" for a lawyer, Google Scholar lets you search academic whitepapers, monographs, patents, and law documents:
http://scholar.google.com/
Need to know more about how homing pigeons find their way home? Or how a subligacalum can give you a wedgie? Chances are that someone's researched it.

Apologies if this reads like an ad for Google; I use the above mentioned services heavily because they save me so much time. Do be aware that Google has changed their "privacy" policy to collect lots of data on how you use their apps.

[spiletta42]

OMG, scholar.google is going to be my new BFF.

[chomiji]

That's the great thing about working on this column - we learn so much ourselves!

[chomiji]

Oooh, lovely! Thanks so much for the shiny new tools!

I've started deleting all my Google cookies from time to time, just to make it a little harder for them. And I use Google myself for work a great deal!