When writing about complex topics, research before you start and while you write is essential to producing a story that flows with accuracy and details. With the resouces available both online and off, there are deep tranches to be mined to provide unique details and descriptive flow for your story. There exists near unlimited reams of media to research aspects of war that are sure to spark new ideas and movements in your story.
All research media matters and provides research value and perspective. Books, video, art, and popular culture can be mined for data points while researching your subject.
For general research to establish a starting point for your subject, there is perhaps no better source than Wikipedia. Wikipedia has at minimum brief amounts of information on nearly every subject you will be researching. With the open crowd-sourced design of this platform, it lends well towards having the broadest possible range of subjects. Caution should however be exercised for the same reason, there are individuals and organizations who have used Wikipedia as a platform to spin a narrative surrounding events that rather than accurately describing the circumstances instead provides a biased view. This is a great example of why any good writer uses multiple data sources for research, so that your own development will incorporate the full picture of a scenario, historical event, person, or equipment that is to be utilized in your story.
One of the methods that researchers use to determine whether or not any sort of bias has been incorporated into a Wikipedia entry is to look at the frequency of changes that have been applied to each article. Articles that do not have multiple instances of data changes that taken in context of the entire article may change meanings should be discarded completely. There are times when new information has been discovered or completed on a topic which could change the context of the article, and these sorts of changes are documented with additional footnotes to accompany the change. So when using Wikipedia for your starting research, using this additional information will help you build the foundation for your research to then begin to start the next steps of your research.
Audio-visual media is an essential source for research as footage from events, of individuals, and equipment in use provides a direct perspective
Audio-visual media can spark areas of creativity that not even the finest written word can produce. When researching a complex topic like war, video and audio recordings that are time specific or event specific to either a specific war or war in general can bring you to that era. One of the best examples of this would be the “whole of nation” approach in the United States towards victory in the second World War. Every aspect of American society had a role to play, including radio programs and printed magazines which featured advertisements from many of today’s companies supporting the war effort.
For video research, the platform that provides a Wikipedia-like level of information is YouTube which like Wikipedia is an open platform that has turned into a croud-sourced video library of near limitless hours on almost every subject. YouTube being owned by Google has access to technology that allows for a significantly advanced artifical intelligence type system for recommanded and related videos based on the video your watching or search you’ve performed. Many of the videos you will find in your research on YouTube will be on particular channels which are posted by subject matter experts, enthusiasts, or first hand accounts and each of these channel creators can be followed up with as you get further in your research.
Podcasts and podcasters rank high as subject matter experts, and can be a good start for “deep dive” foundational research
One of the most innovating new mediums for communication and documenting is what is known commercially as “Podcasting” which blends aspects of a talk show format with traditional documentary type productions. For certain aspects of war research, you may find that using Wikipedia, Youtube and then agumenting with a specific Podcast or Podcast episode gives you the foundational basis to then forumate your next-step research.
There are many different Podcast search engines where Podcast data is aggregated for review. One of the better resources for searching for relevant Podcasts is at PodSearch which has an excellent keyword based search engine. You will find many Podcasts and podcast episodes that cover topics related to war can be excellent resources for developing your research prior to writing.
Our next post will continue digging deeper into methods and resources for research for those writing about war. Stay tuned and make sure you bookmark this page to always see our latest.