📑 Become a Better Digital Researcher: Tips From Tedium

Ernie Smith discusses how he conducts research. He touches on some of the different sources, such as Newspapers.com, Google Books, Google Patents, Internet Archive and a library card. Overall, he estimates that he reads 200 articles a day. In addition to his sources, he provides a number of tips for building out ideas and pieces, including:

• Look past the accepted answer
• Build an overall context behind the history in question
• Don’t go into a story looking to tear anyone down
• Focus on interesting framing
• Make it unique by building in personal anecdotes

It is always interesting reading about how different people conduct their research. Whether it be Maha Bali’s reflection on researching and writing a paper in 10 days, Naomi Barnes’ comparison to walking around city streets, Lucy Taylor’s advice on completing a PhD,  Ryan Holiday’s five steps or Ian O’Bryne’s process for writing a literature review. At the end of the day, I feel that the method often comes down to the intended outcome. Writing a post for Tedium is going to be different to writing a long book which is different to doing a PhD.