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

[laurie_ky]

This was useful, thank you.

Laurie

[chomiji]

You're very welcome!

[caeseria]

Thanks for the help! I had no idea about top level domains and that I could search by them. That'll be a lot of help in the future :)

[chomiji]

I use them myself all the time at work! Happy researching!

[spiletta42]

Great google tips. Site:edu is one of the most valuable hints ever, for fiction research or otherwise. I find that Internet research is excellent for forming a specific list of questions before hitting the library, or for verifying facts that my memory is correct on facts I only fuzzily recall. Everyone probably has this one figured out by now, but slowly typing your first search term will bring up many hilarious useful search suggestions -- I've found some interesting articles that way

[chomiji]

I love kids' books for lots of reasons. David McCauley's detailed picture books on buildings are complete awesomesauce, for example.

Thanks for the additional tips!

[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

[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!

[snycock]

Thanks, that was tremendously helpful! Definitely putting this in my memories...

[chomiji]

I'm so glad this works for you! Thanks for reading!