Hey, everybody. So, in the months since I’ve put up the Dionysus video, I’ve gotten a few emails from people asking about my sources and my process and all that jazz, and around the third time I had to answer one of those emails, I had a sudden epiphany:
“Maybe this process isn’t as intuitive as I thought…”
So today I’m gonna share some sweet wisdom with all of you who’ve ever wondered: “HOW THE HECK TO DO I DO RESEARCH?”
Now, I’m gonna start at the very beginning of the process and it’s probably not what you’re expecting to hear. This may be a bit shocking, and I’d advise elderly members of the audience to take a seat first, maybe check their blood pressure before I get to it.
We good?
Everyone’s sitting comfortably? Okay.
The absolute first step to any research project is…
WIKIPEDIA
No, really. I learned this in university, from a real professor and everything. We all learned years ago that you’re never supposed to cite Wikipedia, and this is completely true.
Nobody trusts it as a source. It would be like citing something you read off the side of a subway car. But what Wikipedia is good at is directing you to ACTUAL sources. Right at the bottom, in that sweet little references section, is a goldmine of all kinds of sources. And even better, the context of the article tells you what kind of information you can expect to find in those sources, and sometimes even what pages they’re on.
It’s fantastic. You can get books, websites, translated primary sources, anything and everything from the reference section. So as you go through the relevant Wikipedia pages, any information that catches your eye will have a nice little citation on it. So grab that sucker and add it to the list! And when I say pages (plural) I mean it! Pretty much everything has its own dedicated Wikipedia page, (except for us) but that single page isn’t gonna be enough to get the full picture. You want to find every page that relates to the subject matter; important places, related people or groups, relevant time periods, stuff like that.
Broadly, you want to get as much related stuff as you can since that’ll let you contextualize the subject; learning about it in isolation only gives you a fragment of the whole picture. Get greedy with it! you want to know everything about this subject, and that means you don’t need to skimp on the sources you pull together.
So, once you’ve combed through every tangentially related Wikipedia page on your chosen subject, noted down a list of promising sources and what you expect to find in them, that’s when you enter stage two:
HUNTING DOWN SOME SWEET SOURCES!
It used to be possible for any shmo 
to type any damn thing there!
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