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Underground > Creation >

Doing the research

12:31 / 15.06.05

How do you go about organising your research? I've not done anything worthy of the name since university (to be honest I wasn't very good at it there either) and I'd like to start again. My technique then generally involved reading a few secondary books (this stage of things really was as unfocussed as it sounds), then trying to get orginal texts to which they referred and work from those then on. Something approaching a plan would generally emerge between these two stages. However, this time round I'm working and unfortunately have significantly less time to spend hanging around libraries reading things which may be useful or equally may be completely irrelevant.

I know that in the end (assuming I don't get distracted by something shinier in the meantime) I'm going to have to do lots of hanging around in libraries anyway -but does anyone have any useful advice about organising research early on, working out what is and isn't going to be useful and so forth?

All Acting Regiment

19:51 / 15.06.05

It's really a skill in itself, you know, filtering gold from pebbles. One tip I can definitely give you on internet research is that websites that don't end in ".ac" are probably not going to be much use. You want academic or nothing, and even some of those sites can be ropey. Real live books are probably your best bet.

Start with "easy", basic texts on the subject by all means. Some people feel ashamed to read "The Rough Guide To Y" or "The Idiot's Book Of X". Why? You need an understanding of the simple facts before you can go onto the more complex ideas.

What is that you're researching at the moment?

Tryphena Absent

23:17 / 15.06.05

It depends how much you want to read... I had a lot of trouble finding relevant books during my dissertation and ended up following the bibliography trail. I think, although you find yourself going backwards chronologically and in some cases with regards to explanation, it only matters if you're dealing with a really confusing subject.

23:52 / 15.06.05

as this question is in 'creation', i assume you are researching for a piece of work - fiction? if so, it depends on how much of the topic you / your character needs to know. a bit of slapdash research can be authentic for a slapdash kinda character!

otherwise, i agree with the previus posts - a dummy's guide can be a good place to get the basic concepts and, importantly, the vernacular.

08:31 / 16.06.05

The reading I want to do is basically about how Prohibition changed drinking culture; to give you a bit more of an idea, anything in this book is, I imagine, going to be useful. And I don't think working backwards is going to be a problem, which is a good thing. Sorry that sounds amazingly dorky, as soon as I write down what I'm interested in it leads me to wonder why other people would possibly be interested! There's not that much at all about it online, or I'm not searching right; most of what I found was along the lines of 'Prohibition was STUPID therefore so is the BUSH ADMINISTRATION'.

astrojax -this in the creation because I thought it would probably be the best place for a thread about a personal project. Fiction may result, but I'd be just as interested in writing non-fiction if anything interesting turned up -at this stage, really, I just want to in knowing more about it and want to know how people plan for relatively long haul research!

02:22 / 20.06.05

good luck with it - just a word picked up from a novel writing workshop i started yesterday: do the research, then forget it... (for fiction, anyway!) it comes across as too forced if you make your characters too knowledgable or spout-offy about a particular subject. ( i recently read macewan's 'saturday', which had very forced research about neurosurgery, made it painful to read some sections, even though i am rather a macewan fan)

but if you do a thesis on drinking, that'd be different. but interesting! i would be interested in what way alcohol fuels culture and expression. for instance, many creative minds have been in the heads of alcoholic bodies - discuss; many drunken bodies have spawned and sprawled through riots at sports events, which in turn are often sponsored by alcoholic product producers and marketers - discuss; what effect does indoctrination to alcohol have at different ages? [for instance, europeans - speaking broadly - give their children small amounts at young ages where the legal age in most of the states is 21. does this affect the type of culture in these societies, or are the differences not spawned by this attitude to alcohol?

cool idea. think you're being harsh on you not thinking there's a market...

15:38 / 20.06.05

Thanks for the encouragement -although this does mean that I'm going to tell you yet more about what I'm doing! The research I want to do is basically historical, what I'm interested in is how cocktail recipies spread in the time of Prohibition; there are a lot of recipies that we know from around that time, and I'm interested in why, and how they spread at the time. Although there are a lot of social or geographical factors that could be involved, so whilst it sounds specific I think it could broaden out quite a bit the more I read. Right now I'm doing a bit of reading around about the Temperance movement, and that's really interesting in itself.

Heh, I've heard from various sources that Saturday doesn't bear its research lightly...

22:29 / 22.06.05

I tend to go for a methodical concerted browse through all of the big books shops In central london and all of the libraries I am a member of... thereafter wandering through secondhand bookshops more out of curiosity than with a direct purpose in mind...

I never quite cracked the British Library's rather arcane computer filing system - it seemed to be designed solely for people who knew exactly what they were looking for rather than browsing for the right thing...