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The Web as a Research tool

There are some sensational research resources for writers on the web. The search engines and other directories have made these accessible. But it helps to understand a little about how they work.

Searching the web

Search engines come in two flavours. They ‘crawl’ the web pages and compile a massive index which is constantly updated.

The useful ones can respond to the key words you enter and so deliver the information you want. 
Then there are some ‘search engines’ that can leave a bitter taste. What they want to do is sell you things.

It is easy to distinguish these two kinds of search engines. The first category is led by ‘Google’ while MSN misleads the pack in the other.

To quote their MSN policy "Sites in the Web Pages section will be ranked below sites that are submitted via the paid submission service and will not be included in the MSN directory. There is no guarantee of acceptance or turnaround time for these submissions.

If you do submit a site at the end you encounter the following messages:

Now that you have created your listing, set your monthly budget using the drop-down menu below.

Your budget is the maximum number of clicks you'd like to receive in each monthly billing period.

At the beginning of each monthly billing period, we will check to see if the funds in your account have dropped below your monthly budget. If so, we will fill your account up to your budget level and you will be charged accordingly.

Directories

The Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/) is providing an independent organisation of web sites. It lists over 3.8 million sites with 54,707 volunteer editors. The idea is that each site will be checked and listed in one of the 460,000 categories.

Subject categories, devised by English graduates, do not always suit scientists. Why are computer books stacked next religion in many public libraries? The ODP rules also limit the real value of this Project. A site on Roman history might have excellent material on eating habits. Buried in a site about hospital engineering you might find a really good section about the bad habits of pathogens. You would have to guess this using the directory system while a word-based search engine might locate these gems.

Books

The web is not the whole answer. Books are still a great source of material. Some, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, are now web-based, although you can still buy the CD. But if you need a book for constant reference, use a site like Amazon to search the site for your topic. They employ some intelligent software that learns from the links created by others, so follow the trail. You might find exactly the book you need because other people who liked the book you are planning to buy have also bought another title. Before you invest you can check the reader reviews and even look for a second-hand edition. You could ‘recycle’ your book when the research is finished.

So...

On balance, a good word-search engine is the way to track down what you are looking for but you need to choose your words and their order with care:

carrot origin orange - produces a lot of recipes for strange soups while

original carrot – plunges you back into the world of recipe but this time for cakes.

origin carrot – starts to throw up some information about the history of the vegetable and

origin orange carrot – throws up a number of sites that yield the information about the development of the purple root crop discovered in Middle Asia.

A few more tips when researching the web

Not everybody spell checks their pages

So try a misspelled word and you might be pleasantly amused with the results. 

To help people find literary agents we embed the words litterary, littery and littary in the pages out of sight as we know these are common words people search for. If you remind yourself that many web users are not native English speakers, nor expert typists, this is not patronising but respectful of the global diversity represented by the web.

A word of warning. 

Many sites seem to clone their content from others. The problem is to identify the original source. If for example you are dealing with medical matters it is important that you base what you are saying on reputable science. 

So treat information with caution. There is no ‘peer review’ of nutty ideas or blatant prejudice on the web.

 

You are not confined to English language sites.

Search engines will offer to translate pieces from other languages which is good for a giggle.

Fair use and Copyright

The idea that you can take large chunks of text and edit them to save you the typing probably won’t work even for non-fiction writers. It seldom works like that. If you are so slow at typing then master the skill right now. You will probably soon discover that it is much quicker to set it out in your own words. The work will flow if you master the research, plan it then write it.

The background noise generated by those who have copied chunks of text and represented them as their original is a problem with amateur sites. There is no effective quality control except your own judgement. Always look for 2 sources for any fact.

Useful web research resources for writers

This list is aimed at fiction writers who need to check some facts or work up a background for a character. Complete essays and college papers are still available but this is not research! As at Feb 03

Science

http://www.sciencenews.org/archives/index.asp

http://www.aaas.org/

http://www.newscientist.com/

http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/index.html

Forensics

http://forensic.to/forensic.html

http://www.forensic-science-society.org.uk/journal.html

http://www.aafs.org/JFSOnline.htm

Medical

http://www.healthfinder.gov/organizations/

http://www.ipl.org/

History

http://www.pro.gov.uk/research/default.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/index.shtml

http://members.aol.com/historyresearch/

Places

Most areas have a site with local names and origins allowing you to put together an appropriate one of your own and avoid civic wrath and lawsuits.

Names

The web has been taken over by people doing genealogical research, the results of which they publish. So it is easy to track down suitable names for your places and characters.

Facts and Figures

http://www.census.gov/main/www/stat_int.html

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/inter-natlinks/sd_intstat.htm

http://www.fedstats.gov/

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ & http://www.statsbase.gov.uk/

The list is not exhaustive, just designed to promote some ideas.

Remember, your readers can use the net to check up on you. So make sure you are getting your facts right.

We also have some links to some excellent sites in our Web resources links page.  These are especially useful for researching online.

Storing what you want

There are several ways to capture the research information.

The trusty notebook – If you treat the web just like a library and jot down the key items of information you have your record ready for your plotting or writing. The great advantage of this is it avoids any risk that you will end up with another voice speaking through your work, as they are all your own words. But this keeps you online for a long time and where do you balance the notebook? If an address you store comes up as a ‘404’ –can’t find the page error, trim the URL you are using, starting from the right until you have trimmed back to the .com or equivalent, and that should lead you to the homepage where you can search for the page you have lost.
Web History – Most browsers store the pages you have visited. So, in theory, you can go back and study them. But many of the important site generate their pages so they will not be visible when you go back.
Bookmarks – If you find a good site it is worth making a note. It pays to take a moment to set up a new folder or category so that you can find the page again. Topical pages often move but all is not lost. So if a site is really important to you it is worth recording the home page.

Printing – This is slow, expensive and ultimately frustrating. Web pages are not designed to be printed and the output can be surprising. You might find the border is there and the content is missing. This is not recommended.
Copy and paste is my preferred approach – Scan through the piece and highlight the section you want (hold down the shift key and move the cursor with mouse or arrow keys) then copy it (control + C). Try to remember to open a new document in your word processor before you start your research and save it with a meaningful name (eg history research) in a logical place (eg the directory where you are writing your book). Move to the document and paste (control + V), and after a few moments the text should appear. If not, see insert. Then copy and paste all the sections you need.

When you paste text from the web into a document, it does not always appear. If the text in the web was white it does not show up well on a white sheet of paper. But don’t worry, it is very easy to change the format and colour of text. Almost all word processors let you set the font, point size and colour as well as applying effects such as bold and underline. However, there is another option which you will often see alongside these font functions. It normally says ‘normal’ or is blank. This is a box of delights which is best avoided by humble wordsmiths. Select normal and all of the imported layout will vanish and your page will look like a normal document.

Another technique to reformatting is to highlight the whole document (control + A) and select the font, size and colour. With the text still highlighted, you can apply a uniform paragraph format as all of the fragments you have imported will have different settings.

 

Quality v Quantity  Advanced searching The Invisible web

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