Voice of the Phoenix Blog » Online Research

NaNoWriMo: Go, Team, Go!

emmephoenix — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:11:43 +0000

Looking for a name for a fictional sports team that has a role in your story? Seeking the name of a real high school team or school nickname?

You’ll want to visit the website High School Nicknames.

On this site, you can find:

• Many, many high school team names, organized alphabetically (did you know that there are two US high school teams called the Aardvarks? How about a team called the Zebras? Would you believe, the Lawyers? The Sea Turtles? The Grape Pickers? The Pied Pipers? The Koalas?

• Top team names by state.

• Top team names across the country. Quick, what’s your guess for most popular high school sports team name?

After you learn that Eagles is the most popular high school sports team name, you might want to check out the teams at Junior Colleges, Four Year Colleges, and Professional Sports Teams.

NaNoWriMo: Valuable Sources for Character Names

emmephoenix — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:57:35 +0000

I ran across some useful sources for character names today that I’d like to share.

• Native American names at Writing Adolescent Fiction/Character Names/Native American but be sure to carefully distinguish tribe-appropriate names.

• Wikipedia Category: Surnames a listing of a large number of surnames that can be searched by the first two letters

• White Pages.com, a place where you can see the distribution of a surname across the United States and also find out how popular it is

• Baby Name Data from the Social Security Administration, in case you have a question like: what boys names were popular in the U.S. in the 1890s? Data is available by decade and state, and you can also find popular names for twins.

• Baby Names World, a particularly useful name site because besides searching by name, you can search by a set of letters that appear at the start, end, or anywhere in the name.

Found by Accident 2 – Climate Change Information

emmephoenix — Fri, 29 May 2009 13:22:13 +0000

There I was, looking for information on climate-related science projects for an article, when I happened on several very interesting – but not for the article, which turned out to focus on variations on creating a greenhouse effect.
Items found include:
• Yale F&ES Project on Climate Change, which offers a number of downloadable reports and publications
• The Essential Principles of Climate Sciences, a booklet offered by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program CCSP)
• The US National Phenology Network volunteer program to monitor plants and animals in order to gain an understanding of the effects of climate change.
Possibly of interest to writers who cover the environment, as well as for school science projects, homeschool use, and members of the general population who are interested in the topic.

Found by Accident – DIY Space Exploration Fleet

emmephoenix — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:57:19 +0000

Looking for one thing and turning up something completely different but really cool is a common occurrence for me in researching on the web.
So far this week, this is what I’ve found unexpectedly:
Looking for useful material for an article about making a scale model of the solar system, I found this great set of materials from NASA that let you (or your child) build your own space exploration fleet at NASA Solar System Exploration Paper Models The models range from easy to challenging and are available as downloadable pdfs, with a link to Adobe Reader, should you need it.
There were also two solar system model sites (the material I was looking for) that I’d like to recommend:
• The Exploratorium site, where you can calculate the relative sizes and distances needed for a solar system model (and you can still include Pluto, if you haven’t gotten over it being demoted ;^) – note the Javascript is required
• The description of “The Thousand-Yard Model, or The Earth as Peppercorn” at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory site

Twitter Research 2

emmephoenix — Wed, 13 May 2009 10:27:55 +0000

Consider setting up a separate account from your personal Twitter account if you’re using Twitter for research. Advantages include the following:
• Tweets about what your best friend ate for breakfast, wore to the movies last night, or is watching on YouTube won’t obscure the latest tweets from your research subject and vice versa.
• You can focus on friends or research without the other interrupting by having only one account open.
• You can keep an eye on both Twitter accounts with a multiple-account enabled app, like Tweet3 (and hopefully TweetDeck, et al. will see the importance of this soon).
• If you need to save tweets (e.g., using Tweetbook http://tweetbook.in), you won’t then have to sort through the pdf or xml so much to find what you need.

Twitter Research 1

emmephoenix — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:42:28 +0000

A new way to do online research is to follow one or more libraries who are tweeting things like:
• acquisitions
• events
• general library news
• links to their blog posts
• new digital services
• hints on doing library research
All you have to do is click on Twitter Library Search and choose which libraries you’d like to follow.
Alternatively, you can search for libraries at WeFollow.
You might wish to follow your local library, a large state library or a university library in your state, and other libraries whose tweets are useful to you – as availability allows.
I’ve found some items of general interest @UVM_Libraries (University of Vermont libraries), where, e.g., they’ve linked to an article telling how faculty can help students improve their library research.

Free Sheet Music

emmephoenix — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:43:44 +0000

There are several reasons that might send someone looking for free sheet music:
• when you need a piece for research or analysis
• when you need a piece for performance
• when you want to create your own arrangement of a piece
• when you can’t remember how a certain piece sounds
Here are some of the places on the web worth checking for large collections with free access. Note that viewing some scores may require additional software, for example Adobe Reader or Scorch.

For a wide range of music:
• Sheet Music Consortium is a group of organizations working to create an accessible collection of digitized sheet music. Collections, most of which are substantial in their own right, include:
    • Library of Congress
    • Duke University
    • National Library of Australia
    • The Maine Music Box
    • Indiana University
    • UCLA Archive of Popular American Music
    • John Hopkins University Levy Collection
• IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library has over 15,000 works
• SibeliusMusic.com sports a new look (as of 5/8/09) and over 90,000 scores. Some scores have a cost, but adding “free” to your search will help sort them.
For choral music specifically:
• The Choral Public Domain Library has over 10,000 scores.
• Cipoo.net: Public Domain Choral Music is approaching 2,000 scores.

Value of the Library—Online Subscription Services

emmephoenix — Sun, 10 May 2009 11:09:40 +0000

Online subscription services are expensive for individuals. Online access to Encyclopædia Britannica is $69.95 per year. A subscription to Grove Music Online is $295.00 per year. With costs like these, it’s a bit challenging to build up your virtual resources.
But there are ways that you may be able to access these services and more . . . for free.

Go to the library!
Many of the online subscription services are really geared to institutions rather than individuals. Their pricing certainly is. And you may already be affiliated with an institution through which you can access online subscriptions for free. Examples of institutions that have such things available include universities, colleges, K-12 schools, public libraries, and museums. And you can’t even participate in ARTstor or JSTOR or Gale Cengage databases unless you are affiliated with a participating non-profit institution
The appearance of a public terminal in libraries so that people without a computer or Internet access could gain the benefits of computing happened some time ago. Now some libraries have multiple computers, and many have added services that you can access.
Better yet, with off-site access, which at least some libraries and education institutions offer, you may be able to access all the resources from home, or wherever you happen to have Internet access (though this may require a VPN—virtual private network—set up). This may depend on your having a library card (a small price to pay). Go to a specified website, type in the password, and away you go.
So, you may be able to access these services through your local library, a school you are attending, a school your child is enrolled in, your alma mater, or a school where you are teaching, even part-time.
I discovered that I actually have three ways to access:
• My public library offers access to a selection of services through Cengage as well as infoAnytime, a 24/7 reference service
• University of Chicago, my alma mater, offers access when I’m on campus, either at the Regenstein library or using Wi-Fi in campus buildings.
• And because I’m offering a summer course through Continuing Education at University of Vermont—EDCI 200 Intro to Writing Across the Disciplines with Technology—I have access to a more impressive array of online subscription services through the Bailey/Howe Library website.

Value of the Library—Overview

emmephoenix — Sat, 09 May 2009 09:10:43 +0000

With so many people owning a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a cellphone+, etc., it may not be entirely clear what the value of the library is today, when actually, the library is still an invaluable resource.
This is the first in a projected series of blogs about library resources and references.
And to start with, here’s a list of some of the key library resources:

• Reference Librarian(s):
They know (and/or can find) sources you’ve never heard of, the collective wisdom of other people’s successes and failures with various types of research, and shortcuts to success
• Online Subscription Services:
Invaluable resources for free that would otherwise be exorbitant or unattainable for most researchers/writers.
• Interlibrary Loan:
If there’s only five copies left in existence of an out of print (OOP) book and none are in your state and it’s not available on Google Books, you can a) find it and b) still get your hands on it.
• Rare Books:
Same as Interlibrary Loan—things you can’t find elsewhere.
• Huge Tables:
I’m not kidding—if you’re in the midst of collecting references from the OED, even online access, a 30-inch monitor or two and the best-ever browser does not compare . . .
• Quiet:
If you’re not the type whose work thrives in the hubbub of landlines and cellphones and iPods and laptops and conversation, it is still possible to find a quiet workspace that isn’t in a secluded study at home: a place of focused intensity.
• Free Movie Rental:
Often a week (or more) and sometimes quite interesting. Check out the children’s section for childhood favorites.
• Story Hour/Movie Showing:
Children are engaged; you work.
• Book Sales:
Donate your unwanted volumes to a good cause; pick up some great bargains. Last library book sale I attended, I found
• The New Cassell’s German Dictionary
• Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes
• The New International Illustrated Encyclopedia of Art
• A Short History of Music
• The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes
• The Best Loved Poems of the American People
the last for sentimental reasons because it was a poetry anthology I found on my parent’s bookshelf when I was a child.

What You Don’t Know . . .

emmephoenix — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:36:52 +0000

Whenever I seek information from a specialist—whether tech support or some other expert—no matter what the topic, I try to remember to make my last question something like this:
What have I not asked you that is important for me to know about [topic]?
Asking a question like this can help in making a leap beyond neophyte knowledge and simplistic categories, so it often proves useful.
The situation gets a little trickier when gathering information from print, the web, and other situations in which there’s nobody to ask. And I ran into this issue yesterday as I worked to set up two blogs—this blog, Rogue Researcher, and A Writer Reads—in Twitterfeed with corresponding Twitter accounts.

The last time I had an ongoing online presence was 2000–2002, when I was webmaster for the Vermont School Information website. A lot has changed since then, so I knew I had some catching up to do.
Seeking both ways to easily follow and post to Twitter and how to link my blog to Twitter, I began by looking at what others were doing:
• I saw that Suzanne Podhaizer, Food Editor for Seven Days @feedmenow (my daughter), is posting from Tweetdeck.
• I saw that Daniel Spreadbury, Sibelius Senior Product Manager @dspreadbury, is using Twitterfeed to link his blog to his Twitter account.
• I saw that David Harvey, Team and Technology consultant @david_harvey, is posting to Twitter using twhirl.
So those were my jumping off points.
I read reviews and visited the websites of
• Twhirl
• Twitterfeed
• Tweetdeck
• Netvibes
• Twitterfox
• Splitweet
• Nambu
• Tweet3
• Peoplebrowsr
• All Your Tweet
• Seesmic Desktop
• Twiterator
I learned that some handle multiple accounts while others don’t (I found CNET’s “Battle of the multicolumn Twitter clients” useful, but noted—through Rafe Needleman’s update—that it was outdated within hours “TweetDeck gets new features, fixes”.
For now, I have both Tweet3 (for the analytics and multi-account functionality) and TweetDeck (on the premise that folks who are working that hard on development are going to come out with a multi-account version sooner or later)—one Adobe Air app and one online service. Reasons for dismissing others included user satisfaction, functionality, their terms of service, and operating system limitations. And Twitterfeed, for which I could find no alternative.
I got everything set up in Twitter, creating custom designs for the background, wrote my first post for each of my blogs, created an OpenID through VeriSign, and entered the feed information into Twitterfeed, all by about 3:30 p.m., about nine hours to research and set up.
One problem. No tweets from my blog. I tried updating the dates. No tweets. I tried copying the entries, reposting them, and deleting the originals. No tweets. I rechecked my feeds in Twitterfeed and couldn’t find anything wrong. It was now about 4 hours after the feeds should have gone live, and they were still listed as “not checked yet (new feed?).”
So I went to the Twitterfeed help page and clicked the support forum link in the answer to the last FAQ. I saw immediately that I was not the only person having an issue with the feed. So I clicked on one likely thread, wrote out a post, and tried to post it.
And all of a sudden I was faced with a log-in into “Get Satisfaction”—an entity of which I had never heard, and (as far as I knew at the time) I had no interest in. I thought it was one of those groups that offers you a survey when you leave a site (though I admit —given the point at which I was caught, I possibly did not read as carefully as I would have had I not been in the midst of a post on a complete service failure). Not understanding a third-party intrusion in the midst of a support query, I must have clicked “block” when asked if they could set a cookie because there was no obvious reason to allow it. Uh-oh . . .
Well, here’s the thing I didn’t know and all my research didn’t tell me:
not only do you need OpenID support to log-in to Twitterfeed, you need OpenID support through Get Satisfaction to enter a support request in Twitterfeed,
and
if you have not previously registered with Get Satisfaction, it will have you set up an account in the midst of your post and send you to its dashboard, from which you cannot get back to Twitterfeed directly until you choose it as a product.
The most unproductive part of my day was trying to sort this out, which I eventually did with the help of Scott Fleckenstein of Get Satisfaction tech support.
I posted to point out that it would be helpful and clearer for Twitterfeed to let users know about the Get Satisfaction connection before they’re in the midst of a support issue and/or to have the log-in happen along with initial log-in to Twitterfeed. And Mario Menti, Head Twitterfeeder, has responded, “I’ll try and make the fact that getsatisfaction is a separate service a little clearer, sorry for the confusion.”
And by 11:30 p.m., Twitterfeed fed my posts.
What most impressed me in the course of the day was a speedy (18 minutes) response from Gary Krall, Technical Director for the PIP/SeatBelt project at VeriSign to an email mentioning that looking at the Terms of Service while in the midst of signing up for an OpenID does not open up a separate window and—by replacing the sign-up window—blanks out any entries that might have been made as the user was starting his or her account set-up. He responded that he had asked his staff to make a change.