Technology tip: Although Google is a great search engine to use for your research, different search engines often return different results. Why not use a meta search engine (a search engine that queries other search engines and then combines the results) to maximize your search results? Here are a few of my favorites:
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Avoid anachronisms in dialogue
A couple of weeks ago, someone on one of my historical fiction listservs asked if anyone out there knew when the term “smelling himself” as in “full of oneself” came about. The writer was afraid of an anachronism in a piece of dialogue she was creating for a historical novel. Someone on the listserv suggested that she try putting the phrase into Google’s N gram viewer.
According to the website, when you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years. You can find plenty of examples at the sites info link.
This free tool strikes me as useful for writers who want to be sure their idiomatic expressions used in dialogue are authentic to the period about which they are writing. Or perhaps you are wondering what year a certain object came into use. I tried an experiment with “seatbelt” and found that the term came into use in print (at least in the books Google searched) about 1960. You can run your own experiment at the site.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Use Google Alerts for Research
Is there a topic, person or location that you frequently search for when you are writing? Create a Google alert for the search term. When your search term appears on the web, Google will send you an alert to your choice of email or RSS feeder.
Think this isn’t useful to a historical researcher? Think again. Most local newspapers carry columns from historical societies. I entered a regional search term into Google alerts, and I regularly receive emailed links to articles written by local historians. It is true that Google alerts might be more useful if you were, say, trying to keep up with the news on your favorite athlete or monitoring a developing news story. But every historical researcher knows that the best info sometimes comes from unlikely sources. As a historical researcher, cast your nets wide and see what you can haul in!
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