Research Extravaganza!
Hello, Dames Nation! Welcome to a celebration of and in the stacks!
Big research energy
Beloved Dame Margaret is on a weekend getaway so darling DamesPal Karen Corday is making her triumphant return to these pixel pages to collaboratively yell once more with Dame Sophie! Thanks to an assignment we’re working on together for publication elsewhere (ooo aren’t we cagey?), we have a lot of thoughts about research. Yes, that feeling you’re experiencing right now is giddy excitement at the prospect of a new-to-you deep dive!
We met on the internet way way back in 1999, on the message boards then hosted by Bust magazine, spent lots of time enthusiastically recommending and swooning over music, books, movies, and television, and moved our nascent friendship into our inboxes when we learned that each of us was hoping to ditch our boring & badly-paid admin assistant jobs for interesting & not-at-all-paid library school. We figured we’d team up to research programs and cheerlead each other through the application process. So a friendship that began in research continues in research as we email and text each other daily with updates about the books we’re requesting via interlibrary loan and the articles we’re digging up on various databases. We both eventually went to library school, and while our paths have diverged quite a bit (Sophie was literally honored by the American Library Association and continues to work for libraries! Karen hasn’t worked in an actual library since getting her MLS and has primarily done higher education data management!), twenty years later we continue to live for and love information in all its forms, finding connections within seemingly disparate things, continually learning and spreading the good word about pop culture past, present, and future, and going entirely off the deep end again and again when it comes to research. Here we are, huzzah!
Actual footage of us celebrating 20 years of this
As researchers who have for decades been asking “hmm, I wonder…” and then walking ourselves directly to the library to find out what’s at the end of those ruminations, we’ve lived through a bunch of different eras of research. In high school, we learned about the Reader’s Guide To Periodical Literature and got elbow-deep in microfilm & microfiche, eventually searching via CD-ROM and then fully digital databases. Something we love about research now is that we have more tools than ever before to help us find what we’re curious about.
We see a lot of analog fetishization discourse, as if the convenience of natural language search was a moral failing somehow. Sure, we love to get lost down rabbit holes of information and resources, but we call bullshit on the idea that putting in hours to find some scrap of a detail somehow makes that detail more valuable than the things we learn in a loosey-goosey first pass search. We don’t need to suffer and sacrifice to gain access to things we’re curious about. It doesn’t make us more noble or deserving of understanding, and we’d like to encourage everyone to throw that punitive, joy-destroying, Calvinist nonsense directly out the window. We came of age in an era in which our ability to find and access was much more dependent on serendipity--wandering bookstores, libraries, thrift stores, and record stores, waiting for subscriptions to cool magazines (Sassy! Paper! Spy! Spin! Mojo! The Source! CMJ, whence comes Sophie’s cultural advisory touchstone, “Recommended if you like…”!) to come in each month we could learn what was new, listening to the radio for hours, relying on the kindness of older siblings and relatives--it was fun and probably made us better, more patient researchers today but it was Not Ideal and often took WAY too long! Effort doesn’t equal valour and gatekeeping for the sake of hoarding Cool Stuff all to yourself is gross. Don’t do it.
TELL ‘EM, MOLLSHED JOTATOES!
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Fun, true fact: buffets are venues for low-stakes, high returns potential research you can visit any day of the week!
Everyday Pathways to Research
It is 100% fine and good if you prefer to enjoy the products of research exclusively, but if you’re the sort of person who wants to cultivate some research process nerd tendencies, here are some of the things we do a lot. We didn’t invent them, obviously, so go forth & use them as useful & desired!
Read obituaries! Does this seem morbid to you? Sophie’s mom taught her to read the obituaries every morning in her tween years and though I no longer get to them every day, it’s still one of the best habits I’ve developed for finding new-to-me people and contributions to be interested in
Always be wondering. This may sound a little grade-schooly, but it really does help if every third sentence out of your mouth begins “I wonder who/how/what/when/where/why about that?” Similarly useful: “I’d love to know more about…”
“Is that actually a reference/callback to something else?” is always a good question to be asking and the internet makes finding the parentage (and grandparentage!) of your favorite piece of culture easy and fun. Sampling is everywhere!
And now, we’ll close out with Some Researchy Things We Love!
Bliss
Sure, we do a lot of our research from the comfort of our homes and libraries, but some of the best research results from hitting the road. Over the summer, Once & Future TBD Guest Editor Jacqui Shine and photographer Daniel Arnold took a road trip from Wisconsin to Missouri (by way of Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas) to report on what patriotism means to Americans right now. We can’t say enough good things about this piece; the Midwest is filled with all sorts of people living all sorts of lives. Reading Jacqui & Daniel’s travelogue made us feel a delicate, uneasy hopefulness about America as an idea & as a daily practice (not in a showy flag-wavy way, though a 100% employee-owned flag company does play a role).
A whole passel of podcasts. We’re in a golden era for research-driven audio and video. If you just cannot do podcasts, no problem. Wherever possible, we’ll link to each one’s show notes so you can get involved without involving your ears.
You’re Wrong About is all about recent(ish) historical events that you may think you know all about. Human behavior being what it is, chances are good you only recall the predominating narrative, and this show’s hosts take turns each episode explaining to the other what we’ve forgotten or lost about those stories. They’re all fascinating, and you can start anywhere, but the recent episodes busting the myth that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles and a devastating two-parter telling the story of the life and death of Nicole Brown Simpson are particularly good. Co-hosts Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall don’t maintain a separate site for show notes; their Twitter feed serves that purpose for now.
Hit Parade, as we have discussed here many, many times, is basically Sophie’s platonic ideal podcast, bringing listeners fascinating stories and back-stories of what goes on in the pop charts and why it matters. It’s monthly, which makes it easy to keep up with, and host Chris Molanphy puts together a playlist for each episode
The Smush Room, is, in its own words, “your weekly deep-dive into well-known and not-so-well known Hollywood romances of your favorite reality TV stars. Think “WhosDatedWho.com” meets a pop culture textbook laced with Criss Angel Dust.” HOWEVER, there are plenty of non reality TV relationships covered, including a personal fav--the recent deluxe three-parter on Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake! Host Troy McEady is hilarious and brilliant and the amount of time he spends digging into old message boards, gossip columns, and other internet detritus is obvious and pays off week after week.
Slow Burn, Slate’s deeply researched podcast focused in its first two series on the biggest political scandals of the late 20th century, Watergate and Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Season Three just began two weeks ago and covers the still-unsolved murders of The Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) and Tupac Shakur. Each episode includes substantial notes and follow-up readings for those who want to know more.
You Must Remember This - Karina Longworth started what has arguably (but who would argue?!) become the gold standard in film podcasts because she wanted to research Hollywood histories on her own terms and “do something exactly the way I wanted to do it, for better or for worse.” YES. It’s inspiring to see something so personal and so, of course, well-researched get the audience it deserves--check out the show notes for every episode! This season’s theme--Six Degrees of Song of the South--is particularly apropos as Disney Plus prepares to make every Disney movie available for streaming except Song of the South. As Disney pretends this weird, racist movie doesn’t exist, YMRT reveals how Disney has profited from it and the effects it had and continues to have on popular culture. The episode on Hattie McDaniel’s ground-breaking, wide-ranging, and often surprisingly (to me; I had no idea!) subversive career was especially good.
Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, which re-examines the legacy of slavery in the United States 400 years after the first enslaved people arrived in Virginia from West Africa, is a peerless research project, to say the least, and is particularly important in that nearly all the contributors are Black. The podcast accompanies the Project’s interdisciplinary, multimedia collection of essays, poems, and photographs, is hosted by Hannah-Jones, and like the rest of the project uses disparate types of research including oral history, genealogy, music, and economics to necessarily investigate, reassess, complicate, and enrich our understanding of U.S. history.
On the video side of things, there are so many channels (some in current production, some archival) to revel in. Some favorites include Vox (who have quite a few channels, covering topics as disparate as global politics, science, and music), Crash Course (which has so many entertaining educational video channels, we find the scope of options almost dizzying), PBS Idea Channel (gone but not forgotten are their witty, thoughtful deep dives into every corner of pop culture)
Anthologies are a tasting menu for cultural dilettantes! Sophie’s favorite of all time is Life Stories, a collection of New Yorker profiles. It includes a peerlessly classic profile of Ricky Jay that everyone should read, and one of Heloise that I think about at least once a month. I have a copy of Wonderful Town knocking around here somewhere and look forward to curling it up with it this winter. A good Norton anthology is not to be sneezed at, either!
Slate’s Annotated Guide to “Hot Topic”- In honor of the 20th anniversary of Le Tigre’s self-titled “if I can’t dance I don’t want to be a part of your revolution” album, Tammy Oler breaks down the importance of “Hot Topic” as a sort of “We Didn’t Start The Fire” of the icons of third-wave feminism [my words, not hers, don’t blame her!] and its role in “democratizing a lot of feminist knowledge: The song name-checked people many of us only learned about in our college women’s studies courses or in the pages of Bitch or Bust magazines. (Don’t forget that in 1999, we were still accessing the internet via dial-up and Wikipedia was two years away from being launched.)” The article includes the lyrics alongside a slideshow of artist Kirsten McCrea’s early 2000s paintings of every person name-checked in the song! WE LOVE A GOOD PASTICHE, YES WE DO!
Research Buzz provides “news and information about search engines, databases, and social media,” has been around longer than we’ve been talking about going to library school, and is a labor of love of info pro Tara Calishain who’s been doing this for so long and so well that she co-wrote The Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research! My favorite is the “specialty search” tag in the site’s “Firehose Mode,” which is a great way to find incredibly specific search engines and search techniques, including how to find key moments in videos and Lights, Camera, Backbeat, “devoted to popular music in the first 60 years of sound-enabled film.”
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Derry Girls coming to the Holiday Bake-Off!
The dreamiest wanted poster of all time, written either by Michael Collins himself or by a love-struck police sergeant (whomst amongst us could resist the kiss curl hovering above his blue-grey eyes?)
This almost erotically delicious-sounding fried rice omelette dish!
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