Tedium - How I Research Stuff 🔎

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Five tips for telling an in-depth history about something using the internet

1. Look past the accepted answer. It’s easy to look at a Google search and find a result that seems to answer a trivia question that you’ve had floating around. But simply taking the accepted answer and running with it is bad research. Look it up for yourself where you can. You might uncover previously unseen evidence of prior art, like I did when I found an example of a whiteboard that dated to the 1930s a few months ago.

2. Build an overall context behind the history. A few years ago, I wrote about Ayds diet candy, a topic that had frequently come up as a point of mockery on various parts of the web but didn’t seem to have additional context behind it. I wrote about it with the plan not to mock it, but to understand it, and explain its overall cultural moment. And the result is that the piece tells a more well-rounded story than most other places online. Another tip: Even if something is really old, find a modern hook that can build a valuable tie to the modern day.

3. Don’t go into a story looking to tear anyone down. One of my most popular pieces of all time, a story about how Bob Vila was fired from This Old House because of his sponsorship deals, could have easily been written a way that attacked Vila or the franchise that fired him. Instead, it approached the story down the middle, offering a context that pointed at the broader structural issues that led to the conflict.

4. Focus on interesting framing. A router that accidentally became open-source on its own is an interesting tale. But what makes it a story that people actually want to read is the fact that you or someone you know probably owned that router. Finding an angle that can pull in a bigger tent is always better than simply aiming narrowly.

5. Make it unique by building in personal anecdotes. My other story this past week, about products with hidden features, could have been written without the tale about how I opened up a Shirt Tales drum and found a completely different design inside of it. But because I added it, it became a tale that only I could have told in that way. In an era when people aggregate information wholesale, putting your own voice in there ensures that your view is the one that sticks.

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How do I find these things I look up?

The thing about Tedium is that it’s research-driven. As much as possible, we try to back up our stuff as possible, to uncover quotes and details and highlight them as needed.

And that requires a lot of digging, something that the internet is amazing at. I use a mixture of sources, both free and paid, to do what I do. Among the parts of my toolkit that are most important:

Newspapers.com: This paid platform isn’t cheap—I pay $75 every six months—but it gives me access to more than 200 years of research materials that include most of the world’s English-language newspapers. Beyond finding stories, having access to a huge archive of newspapers makes it useful to do historic language research to figure out where a phrase emerged from. (My clippings page is here in case you’d like to follow along.) It’s perhaps the most important resource I use.

Google Books: This research resource is one of Google’s best features, so of course Google hasn’t done much with it in a decade. Nonetheless, it’s still full of lots of materials, including many reference books that can be viewed in preview mode. It also offers access to some important historic magazines in the context of technology and popular culture, including Billboard, Boys’ Life, InfoWorld, and Popular Science. One challenge Google Books creates is “snippet mode,” in which copyrighted materials are only allowed to appear in a very limited fair-use way. I’ve ranted about this in the past.

Google Patents. Much more up-to-date than Google Books, the patent site helps uncover the origin of common objects, as well as their evolution. I used it to great effect when I did my piece on the Kensington lock earlier this year.

Internet Archive. This resource started out good and has gotten significantly better over time. You may be familiar with the archive’s Wayback Machine, but I really recommend you dive into the archive itself as well, which now lets you check out software, old magazines, and old books. In the latter category, it is now possible to check out individual books for an hour at a time, making it perfect for research.

The New York Times. Of mainstream newspapers, the Times is the one that is best about managing its archives, which go back to 1851 and cover most major stories of the past two centuries. TimesMachine in particular is a victory of deep research.

There are other research sources, of course—I haven’t even discussed academic papers, which are a massive can of worms. I also recommend taking advantage of the never-ending pool or randomness that is YouTube. If something appeared on TV 30 years ago, odds are it’s on YouTube in some form. Especially if it’s an episode of Computer Chronicles.

I also recommend getting a library card. This sounds like a funny recommendation for digital research, I know, but many libraries these days make lots of research available on the internet, making a library card a secret weapon on the internet in a way that it often is in real life. Take advantage of it—it’s free!

I tend to write and research at the same time, as I find it helps me think through my thoughts on a topic to do it simultaneously. After all, my best quips are likely to emerge upon immediate reaction, and it’s more fun that way anyway.

I realize I produce a lot of content, much of which you may have never read. And so much of it is done for me as a creator with lots of itches to scratch. I will never get through all of my itches, but it’s not for a lack of trying. As a writer, the best way to keep all of this exciting is to keep inventing new ways to do so. And the way I do that is to treat the internet as a never-ending font of research.

Not everyone has quite the ambition to write thousands of words twice a week. I’m a special case. But I want to encourage you, if you love the internet, to embrace its potential as a research and creation tool.

You’ll be glad you did, and you might learn something along the way. Tell better stories. It’s a great way to bring the internet to life in a way a bunch of ranting on Twitter never will.

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