A good portion of the research budget for the new book was selling my Inuyasha manga (which to be fair I hadn’t read in years). This is still better than my old budget for Fractals: A Programmer’s Approach, which consisted largely of buying fractal books I could get for $4 (1 penny cost plus $3.99 shipping). For both books I’ve made good use of the library, and the wonders of this thing called the internet, and I thought I’d share a little of what I’ve learned along the way.
Dover Pictorial Archive: A lot of what I’m looking for in this book are designs from different cultures and some background on drawing techniques, religious significance, history, etc. There are a number of great books on Amazon all pretty affordable from the Dover Pictorial Archive. But if you’re even more of a cheapskate, for a lot of these books you can look on the copyright page (using Amazon’s Look Inside feature) and find the original public domain book the new printing is based on. The Internet Archive will often have the original book for free. Now considering the fact that one of the books I did this for was originally in French (Les Elements de l’Art Arabe), there are some drawbacks to this approach. But then again, if your main interest is public domain designs, this isn’t a bad way to go.
Papers Submitted to Conferences: A number of the papers I’m working from are from various years of the Bridges conference. Most of this stuff is available for free online on the conference websites and includes some fascinating material, ranging from presentations of new techniques, to more general overviews.
Papers on Professor Websites: If you find a particular name coming up again and again, you might want to find their university page to get a complete list of their papers. Some will be available directly on their site. Just be sure to keep some idea of when you accessed them and their URL for your works cited.
Google Books: Let’s face it, you really might only need 5 pages of a 1000 page tome that costs over $100. Google books isn’t a bad way to find the little tidbits you need from books without forking over for the whole thing. It can be a little hit or miss as to whether you’ll be able to access the parts you need, but often you can get enough.
ILL (Inter-Library Loans): I haven’t done this a lot since I tend to get more done with digital sources, but ILL’s can be a good way to get that expensive book you really need (the one that every paper seems to cite). Just be sure to return the book on time or you’ll be slapped with pretty hefty fines.
Your own collection: I have a whole bookcase dedicated to fractals, some of which I’ve barely touched. Some material that didn’t really work for Fractals: A Programmer’s Approach might be just what I need for this one. Keep a running archive of the things you gather even if you never use them (I keep all my papers in Calibre). And you can always raise a little money by selling books you no longer need (though do this wisely because you’ll lose more if you end up buying the book again).
Google the Works Cited: Most papers and books will have a good bibliography. While not all of these resources will be accessible, some will be, and there’s a good chance they’ll fit in with your subject since the author based their work on them.
My last two tips don’t really have anything to do with money, but I think they’re valuable nonetheless:
Do the Works Cited as you go: I never do this, and I always realize later that I should have. If you’re pulling from a lot of diverse sources, you absolutely need to keep track of them, or you’ll have to do detective work to find them again.
Cite more than one author: Some of the areas I’m covering really haven’t been widely studied, but there are still ways to corroborate the research of one-off writers. Again the works cited is key, and some wider Googling. Just be careful if everyone else has based their work on your one original source without any new information. If they’ve been out there for a while, it’s probably fine, but it’s better to have multiple sources.
Friday’s post won’t be so work related. I’ll review something fun you’ll like.
[BTW] : Ben Trube, Writer 