Sometimes a photo doesn’t just give up its secrets. In this week’s Challenge, I heard a great story about a nearby place, and went to visit it. Somehow, I missed the thing I was sent to find. As you know, sometimes you have to search a bit to learn w…
Hats, Badges, Cloth… … are all signifiers — that is, they all connote much more than you’d think, with meaning and symbolism dripping all over. Knowing the backstory is crucial for these kinds of things. As in my story about the appearance of th…
Several years ago… … I went with a friend to the Edinburgh Tattoo. It’s a wonderful, gigantic mass of Scottish pipes and drummers, with bands from around the world marching back and forth in formation, skirling the pipes and percussing the drums. …
This turned out to be simpler than I expected… The Challenge this week was to find a lake somewhere in the world that had turned deadly. How deadly? And how was it deadly? We were looking for a non-poisonous, non-boiling lake… That is, NOT lik…
Not long ago I was reading about a strange lake… I know what you’re thinking–how strange can a lake be? A lake’s a lake, right? In this case, the lake I’m thinking of seems not just strange, but deadly. The lake I’ve been reading about directly c…
As you know… … the language of the past is somewhat different than the one we speak (and write) now. As a consequence, when you’re trying to search for historical content, you sometimes (often?) have to shift your language to accommodate the way …
There’s always been a gap between …those who know how to use information resources and those who don’t. Students who knew the ways to leverage a library for research could consistently do better research than those who couldn’t. That’s not a …
One of the greatest problems with the past… … is that the language they spoke then is different than what we speak (or write, or blog). As a consequence, when you’re trying to search for historical content, you sometimes (often?) have to shift you…
TILT: Things I Learned TodayOne of the true pleasures of life in the Age of the Internet is our historically unparalled ability to notice something interesting out there, and then using your SearchResearch skills to figure what’s the backstory to this …
TILT: Things I Learned TodaySince I’m a curious guy, I often write down things that I notice during the day. Usually, at the end of the day I spend a few minutes to look these things up and write them down in my notes as TILT, Things I Learned Today.T…
Why do you need to know stuff? This is a question I often get from students and from people who don’t do much research. If you spend any time actually doing research, you realize that it’s crucial for you to have the ability to recognize things and th…
There are some things you just have to know… … or should be able to just figure out off the top of your head. A great question to think about is this: What should those basic pieces of background knowledge be? This week’s Challenge might not be t…
Surprise! Although I thought that this week’s Challenge would be difficult, it turned out to be fairly simple and straightforward. Here’s what I did (obviously only AFTER I wrote the Challenge)… 1. Over the past 150 years there have been a huge num…
Finding what’s in common… … is often an important step in making sense of complex or confusing information. Finding what’s common across a collection of data is often the key insight to figuring out what’s going on. Scientists look for common dat…
Traveling is an endless source of questions… This week brought the “who’s on the teapot?” question (as seen on a teapot from my host’s home) and a more commonplace question–“what kind of trees are those?” As it turned out, the man on the teapot too…