How to Research Your Novel on the Internet
Use the World Wide Web to Get Accurate Information for Your Stories
Dec 4, 2008
Research for your book or short story will take on many forms from subtle to obvious and from non-directed (opportunistic) to directed (e.g., library). Its form and rigorousness will vary according to your purpose and circumstance. And where you go to do your research will vary accordingly.
Internet as Resource and Risk
Chances are that your favorite newspaper or magazine has a strong online presence. The internet provides an excellent platform for finding resources in a myriad of subjects. It is the largest single place where you can find current information relevant to almost anything.
With information so readily accessible and easy to find through Google and other search engines as well as giant amoeba-like encyclopedia wiki sites like Wikipedia, you needn’t suffer the frustrations of library and book searches. However, there is risk.
The risk is related ironically to the very accessibility of online information. You need to be even more vigilant of the veracity and reliability of your sources when conducting online research.
Optimizing Your World Wide Web Search
The Teaching Library Internet Workshop at Berkley University provides excellent tutorials on how to search the internet for topics. They recommend a search strategy that analyzes your topic and searches with “peripheral vision”. For instance, they suggest that you:
- define for your topic any distinctive words or phrases, an overview of the broader topic to which your topic belongs, any synonyms equivalent terms or variants of spelling to include
- not assume you know what you want to find. Look at search results and see what you might use in addition to what you've thought of
- switch between search engines and directories and back
Verifying Your Internet Research
When doing research, particularly on the internet (but anywhere), you should do several things:
- Use more than one source, particularly for important things; this will give you a wider range of material from which to discern accuracy and reliability
- Verify your sources and preferably cross-reference to measure out objective “truth” vs bias
- Try to use primary sources (original) vs. secondary or tertiary sources (original cited and open to interpretation); the closer you are to the original source, the closer you are to getting the original “story”
- When going to more than one source, try to get a range of different source-types (e.g., conservative newspaper vs. blog vs. special interest site, etc.) to gain a full range of insight into the issue you’re researching
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