Research Skills!
So, I promised @fansirvice a post about research skills for use in roleplay. Maybe you’re a worldbuilder, or you’re trying to craft that perfect name or background for your character, or you just want to find out how to make strawberry jam for a plot. That is where research skills become handy!
For ease of reading, I’m going to split this post into categories based on the above – Worldbuilding; Character Development; General. So grab hold of your nuggets, and let’s go!
Worldbuilding
Wikipedia:
Wikipedia! Who couldn’t love it? Crammed so full of useful facts and information. It really is a very good starting point, but caveat emptor: many wiki pages allow anybody to edit them, so there’s a chance that some of what you’re reading might not be wholly reliable. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has come across entire articles where sources have not been cited, as well.
This said, the vast majority of Wikipedia pages DO have sources. So, say we’re looking up…. medieval cuisine, because you’re writing a medieval setting. You’ll notice a lot of random words linked to other articles – try not to fall down the rabbit hole at this point, as tempting as it is. Stay on target!
So, what do you want to find out about medieval cuisine? Maybe you need to know when people ate during the day, so let’s look at the section on meals. So, two meals during the day – dinner (lunch), and supper in the evening, although breakfast was tolerated for the working classes, children, women, the elderly, and the infirm, and light snacks and small meals during the day, again for those of the working classes doing manual labour.
You’ll notice there are cite notes. It’s worth checking these to see if there’s anything you can get hold of easily. In the case of what I’ve just mentioned – the habits of medieval mealtimes – the citations are from books.
You can, of course, write down the titles (if provided), and look them up later. For this, Google can be helpful. One of the books cited in the medieval cuisine article is Food habits in change : the example of Europe, by Eszter Kisbán. A quick google brings up a website called WorldCat, which allows you to look up books and find out if there’s a copy in any libraries near you. (Unfortunately for me, the nearest library with a copy of this particular source is in Switzerland. Oh dear.)
But, this said, some books – more recent titles, particularly – may be available on Amazon if you’re interested in getting a copy. Other books might be available on Google Books, and all you need is an author, title, keywords, or ISBN number.
Google Scholar is worth a check if you’re looking for articles that have been cited, as well. (Search tips here.)
Some sources (such as cite note 22 on the medieval cuisine article, about medieval monks ending up with arthritis!) may lead to other web sources, in this case, an article from a newspaper.
You can also check the references section of the Wikipedia article, which provides book titles and authors, ISBN numbers, and publishers. Below that, there’s a section on external links, which provides us with webpages.
Make full use of these references and sources. They can provide you with context for the information in the wiki articles, and further details.
CIA World Factbook
Why are you pointing me to the CIA, Joymun?
Because it’s useful, that’s why.
The CIA World Factbook provides information about different countries, such as their flags, leaders, population, geographical information, and so on. There are also maps. You can pick a country from a drop down menu on the right hand side of the page, and it provides a profile of the country, maps, and flags.
So, for the sake of this article, here is the page about the United States of America.
This in particular would be handy for a worldbuilder creating their own country or culture, owing to the information about demographics, economy, governance, etc.
Other
Timeanddate.com: Need to know what time it is in Japan? Need to know when the sun rises in Moscow? Need to know what phase the moon will be in January 31st 2037? (Full Moon, by the way.) Timeanddate.com has your back.
Wunderground.com: For all your weather needs! Current weather, forecasts, historical weather records. Get ‘em all here!
I’m sure there are other resources, but these are just a few of the ones I find particularly helpful. Sir recently reblobbed an article containing a massive list of resource pages, so be sure to check it out!
Character Development
So, you need a name for your character?
My personally favoured websites for this are, “Behind the Name”, and “Surnames at Behind the Name”. Both websites contain lists of common names, gathered together by location, although it can be further narrowed down by gender. It also has fictional and mythological names, as well as ancient and medieval names.
On both sites, you can search by name, meaning, popularity, namesakes, or related names.
They also provide lists of current most common names, again by location and gender.
One of my favourite things about these two websites is that it also provides the etymology – a breakdown of the elements and meanings – in the name. So, my own name, Fiona, comes from the name of the Irish hero, Fionn MacCumhail. The name “Fionn” itself means “fair” (as in, the dude had blond/white hair).
You can use these elements to build your own names, as well. So, say I want to name someone Hiroko – Hiro breaks down to “great”, “generous”, or “prosperous”, depending on the kanji used, and “ko” is a common suffix for “child” (and is common on the end of women’s names).
By choosing a name, you can then start to make decisions about your character’s life. Where are they from? What time period did they live in? What is their family like? What are they like as a person? Do they live up to their name, or do they defy its meaning? (My name literally means “blond/white haired one” – I’m brunette and have never bleached my hair.)
Some of this might end up wrapping around back to worldbuilding – finding out what life was like in the era or location they’re living in.
In terms of developing character traits, TV Tropes can be a pretty good resource for figuring out this stuff. So, under Narrative Tropes, for instance, you can find Characterization Tropes, which has a large list of attributes that could apply to your character (plus a lot of subcategories for particular expressions of these attributes).
Similarly, you can use TV Tropes as a jumping off point for settings, plots, genre, and so on.
As with Wikipedia, there’s a lot of citing, and most articles have examples gathered from various media, so you can check out various books, films, movies, videogames, animé, and so on that suit whatever genre you’re writing for.
General Help
One of the best tips I have is to make your google searches specific. We’ve all had those moments when we’ve gone to google something, only to find thousands of pages, and gotten overwhelmed.
One of the ways you can narrow it down is to make your search specific to a site. So, to do that, you would type in site:sitename.com your search here. So, for instance, site:tvtropes.org Peter White will have the page for Heart no Kuni no Alice in amongst them, which is what I would be looking for in this case.
You can also narrow down by providing other search terms. So, for instance, site:tvtropes.org Peter White -“White Collar” -“Peter Pan”, will show the Heart no Kuni no Alice page as the top result, because it removes any references to “White Collar”, or “Peter Pan”.
Similarly, a string reading, site:tvtropes.org Peter White +“Alice in Wonderland”, will provide a similar result, because you’re adding a reference.
Google provides a means of further narrowing down results with a Tools button on the results page. So, if you’re looking for information on current events (say, you googled Puerto Rico), you can press the Tools button, and from there, you can narrow down to results from within a country, or a time period. You can also do this to look for something verbatim – that is, word for word.
It’s also worth checking out the category headers – where it says “Images | Videos | Shopping | News” if you’re looking for something in particular. Again, for current events, use the News category to narrow down your search if you’re looking for information from a particular publication, or for recent articles.
Reverse image searching can also be your friend. This can be handy, for instance, if you find a piece of fan art you love but there’s no source, and you want to tell the creator that you love it.
Google Images allows you to do this one of three ways: upload a copy of the picture to the search; pasting the image URL; or just dragging and dropping the image on to the search by image box.
So, for instance, dragging and dropping Sir’s picture of Auron from @fansirvice brings up, “best guess for this image: final fantasy auron fan art”, and provides visually similar images, and possible search results:
So, scrolling down, it turns out that the image came from DeviantArt, and happens to be in a collection. Following the trail from the collection, I found out that it’s by an artist called cold-nostalgia, and that the artwork is available here.
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So, I know that was quite long, but I hope that this is of some help to those who need it! If there’s anything I forgot, or that you think should have been added, please feel free to reblog and tack on additional information!
