Yeah, almost two years since I last posted. I blame Google Docs. You see, I haven't not been doing any research. Research is about ALL I have been doing. Tables boards, pieces, rules. Cards, designs, games, and etc... Pottery. 3-D printing medieval buttons, and belt buckles, and mounts, and strap ends, and....
But why do I blame Google Docs? Because that has become my new commonplace book. As I search the internet I find images and references and documents and I grab that info and add it to a new Google Document. The main document of references I maintain on playing cards is over 150 pages long, currently. The associated files not contained in the document account for a little over 6GB. It's gotten to the point that I take pictures of items with my phone and upload them rather than trying to keep physical copies. And thanks to free scanning applications I can even translate pictures of text to text. Image viewer doesn't allow me to download a zoomed view of a medieval document? Alt+Printscreen, GIMP crop, and voila. God but I do love this modern age!
Of course, it's not all sunshine. But the clouds are mostly of my own making. When I started this (combs, I'm looking at you) I just grabbed the photo and moved on. And a couple of weeks later when I wanted to go back and do more research I had failed to note where the picture had come from and it took me a while to find it again. If I could. Yep, some pictures I've never found again. Even using the Google photo search capabilities.
So now I get the picture (really, just drag it from the screen to the Google Doc), I get the URL of the picture and put it beneath the picture, I get the URL of the page the picture appears on, and then I grab descriptive text from the page and/or add my own notes. In effect, building my own annotated reference bibliography. If the file is a PDF then I grab the info regarding that file in the same fashion and download the PDF file to Google Docs and then I add a link to my copy of the file. Voila.
Finding the information on the internet has been... interesting. There is a lot of information to find. If you aren't a member at your local museum, become one. Or join a museum you like. Because museums are digitizing their collections and making them available online and it's amazing what you can find if you're patient enough.
I separate internet searches into two levels: surface and sub-surface. Surface searches are actually enormous in scope; they are everything you can find in a Google search. The sub-surface searches are the databases accessible through the internet but not through Google itself. I usually use Google to locate these sources and then go to them and see what they hold.
Surface searches. There's a vast amount of information to be found on the web. Google will help you find it. The first thing you need to do is figure out what you're looking for. While this sounds simple, it's not always the case. The best information is frequently found in professional sources and professions sometimes have different names for things. Compile a list of your search terms and start looking. Try mixing them up. Now do the same thing in different languages. If you're researching playing cards you're going to need to use German search terms to find a lot of the best information, for example. Google Translate is your friend in finding these search terms and in getting the gist of what the foreign language documents are saying. BUT, you need to look at the foreign language documents in their original language to find more search terms.
A good way to find information rich sources is to limit the filetypes you are searching. Google will allow you to specify. My favorite document type is a PDF. This file format is the favorite of museums and researchers and document digitizers. That makes it particularly likely to contain high-quality information. I simply end any Google search with filetype:PDF and it will show me only PDF files.
Another way to quickly assess the results of a search, particularly for a foreign language, is to use the image search in Google. While it can be hard to determine if a Greek document is worth looking at on the basis of the Greek text description returned by a typical Google search, if I see an image the site contains that has, for instance, a comb, then I know I've found something worth looking at. You can also right click on a photo and have it search for other instances of the same photo (great for finding other pages that you're looking for) and visually similar images (not usually a winner but sometimes you hit the jackpot).
This process is easy to get lost in so it's good to take notes along the way. Remember what search terms you're currently using (write them down). Take notes of search terms you want to use: words, phrases, books, other references.
When you find a site that looks like it has multiple references, mine it. Google will allow you to search a specific website. Site:www.example,com will search only that site for your search terms. Sometimes you aren't meant to see other web pages within a site. You can sometimes circumvent this. Try removing the name of the webpage from the website URL and see if you get access to the info within. Example: www.example.com/motherlode/example.html becomes www.example.com/motherlode/ Fewer and fewer web administrators make this mistake, but sometimes they do. Is this hacking? Not according to the legal opinion I sought out a couple decades ago. Honestly, this technique is mostly useless these days as the Google web-crawlers tend to find these resources. But sometimes you turn over a rock and find cool stuff.
Sub-surface searches are more likely to be information rich but they can be difficult to locate sources and harder still to get access. WorldCat is a good example of a readily available database. Google does not index WorldCat so while you can find it with Google, you can't search it. WorldCat is a worldwide catalog connected to hundreds of libraries worldwide. You can use it to search in much the same way you search Google. It not only references books it references articles and online resources. It's also a great resource for Inter-Library Loans. My two library accounts allow me to sign in to World Cat from the library website and make an ILL request directly from WorldCat. My library memberships also grant me access to different databases referenced by WorldCat. A university membership might come with access to different academic databases, for instance. You'd be surprised at the places you can get membership. A one year reader's card for the Oxford Library System (hello Bodleian!) is 40 Pounds.
Museum and University sources are also great sub-surface sources to search. Many European institutions, including libraries, are digitizing their holdings. The Denver Public Library has a large database of photographs from the late 19th Century American West, for instance. I like to identify institutions that hold resources I want to examine, based on my previous searches, and then go to those sites and see if I can search them. Frequently they are free. More frequently you can get access for a small fee, particularly the European institutes. Sometimes you just need to access the database from the right source (hint: institutions which offer free access, usually European, or institutions at which you have a membership).
The databases are information rich but sometimes very difficult to search. Google Translate is your friend in finding the database, but once you're in you're generally going to have to navigate in the language of the database. Translate will help you still by allowing you to translate individual terms. It helps to think of it as an adventure. Remember that bibliographies are a great comfort in times of search. And try to come at problems from a different angle. I have found, for instance, several books that were rather expensive available for download free of charge. Why? Because they were the Master's or Doctoral theses of the authors and were published by their Universities.
Be creative, be persistent, and have fun. And that's all I've got to say about that at the moment.
