https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sigJwoeU6OI
So, in the months since I've put up the Dionysus video, I've gotten a few emails from people asking about my sources and my process and all that jazz,
and around the third time I had to answer one of those emails, I had a sudden epiphany:
"Maybe this process isn't as intuitive as I thought..."
So today I'm gonna share some sweet wisdom with all of you who've ever wondered
"HOW THE HECK TO DO I DO RESEARCH?"
Now, I'm gonna start at the very beginning of the process and it's probably not what you're expecting to hear
This may be a bit shocking, and I'd advise elderly members of the audience to take a seat first, maybe check their blood pressure before I get to it
We good? Everyone's sitting comfortably? Okay.
The absolute first step to any research project is... WIKIPEDIA
No, really. I learned this in university, from a real professor and everything
We all learned years ago that you're never supposed to cite Wikipedia, and this is completely true.
Nobody trusts it as a source. It would be like citing something you read off the side of a subway car
But what Wikipedia is good at is directing you to ACTUAL sources.
Right at the bottom, in that sweet little references section, is a goldmine of all kinds of sources
And even better, the contect of the article tells you what kind of information you can expect to find in those sources, and sometimes even what pages they're on.
It's fantastic
you can get books, websites, translated primary sources, anything and everything from the reference section
So as you go through the relevant Wikipedia pages, any information that catches your eye will have a nice little citation on it.
So grab that sucker and add it to the list!
And when I say pages plural I mean it!
Pretty much everything has its own dedicated Wikipedia page,
(except for us)
but that single page isn't gonna be enough to get the full picture.
You want to find every page that relates to the subject matter
important places, related people or groups, relevant time periods, stuff like that.
Broadly, you want to get as much related stuff as you can since that'll let you contextualise the subject; learning about it in isolation only gives you a fragment of the whole picture.
Get greedy with it! you want to know everything about this subject, and that means you don't need to skimp on the sources you pull together.
So, once you've combed through every tangentially related Wikipedia page on your chosen subject, noted down a list of promising sources and what you expect to find in them, that's when you enter stage two:
HUNTING DOWN SOME SWEET SOURCES!
So now you've got a list of sources you think will lead to more information, and, the odds are good, most of them are gonna be books.
So you can either check your local library catalog and see if they have the sources you need, or you can give the titles a google and see if you can find them online.
Legally, of course.
Sometimes Google Books has a preview available; and sometimes, it even contains the pages you need.
But mostly you're gonna be looking for e-books or library copies.
Now, this advice all applies pretty much universally:
No matter what you're trying to research, the process of finding sources is usually going to boil down to:
find a library or google it and get really lucky.
But let's say, for the sake of specificity, you're researching something... historical.
Like a.. mythological figure, for example.
In cases like this, you're gonna need to start dealing with
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES
Now broadly, if you're studying a historical thing,
the primary sources are gonna be stuff that was written directly about that thing,
from people who are point blank on the thing, or otherwise had first-hand experience with its thing-ness.
The secondary sources are the stuff written about the primary sources,
and thus they're at least one degree of separation away from the original thing.
And the number one rule in any kind of research is you always want to find the primary sources first.
If they still exist, they don't always.
If you're trying to learn about something, and you have the option of reading a bunch of first-person accounts of that thing or a book somebody wrote about those first-person accounts of that thing, choose the first-person accounts.
It'll take longer to get through but you'll get a much more accurate perspective.
No text is free from bias, but the fartheraway the writer was from the subject they're writing about,
the more bias will be present in their interpretation.
It's like in the giant n-dimensional game of telephone that is history:
The actual thing you're trying to research is the starting person,
and the primary sources are all the people right next to the starting thing who probably heard it pretty clearly.
But all the secondary sources are from farther down the line,
where you're starting to get garbled interpretations of interpretations,
and maybe somebody along the way started actively messing with the other players by not actually repeating what they heard in the first place.
And... it's a mess.
Basically, if you want the clearest image possible of the thing you find the primary sources.
Now again, purely hypothetically let's say you're researching a... Greek god or something,
and you want to know what they were like back in the day.
your primary sources are going to be the myths about that God or the hymns recorded in their worship.
And even then, it's important to note that these sources were most likely translated
from the original Ancient Greek to English,
and that translation adds a layer of bias as well.
But while primary sources will give you a good look at the thing in question, you actually do need secondary sources.
Specifically, you need secondary sources that help you contextualize the primary sources.
To understand the possible biases and factors present in the primary sources, you want to know who wrote them and when and what exactly was happening at the time.
Primary sources let you examine the thing, secondary sources let you examine the primary sources.
And it's very important to do both when you're doing research.
You can't just take these sources at face value,
(TRUST NO ONE)
and you gotta be aware that the writers all had their personal take on the subject.
And the more you know about that take, the more you'll be able to extrapolate what parts of the original thing they might have been minimizing or putting the spotlight on.
It'll help you get a clearer picture of the original.
It's also important not to shy away from credible sources of information that don't seem to fit with what you already know about the subject
If you're only looking for stuff that agrees with you, you're not actually doing research; you're just looking to confirm what you already think.
But this is another reason why it's very important to look at the context for your sources, to judge whether or not they're actually credible.
if your conflicting information is coming from... I don't know, someone's unsourced Tumblr post, you might not want to assign it as much literary weight as the complete works of Homer.