Seeing the forest, not just the trees: an expert shows how to hack through information as you research - using Personal Information Managers for research notations - includes related article on research tips

Home Office Computing, April, 1993 by Robin Rowland

Thirty years ago, long before the personal computer, the late historian Barbara Tuchman, author of The Guns of August, recommended that a person doing research use four-by-six-inch cards stored in a shoe box. "The use of cards, the smaller the better, forces one to extract the strictly relevant, to distill from the beginning," Tuckman said.

I hate file cards of any size. I love computers. In the 1990s, the equivalent of Tuckman's index card is a free-form card file or text-retrieval Personal Information Manager (PIM), not a word processor. The card file forces you to distill that mass of information you have to sift through, to extract the "strictly relevant" and to retrieve it quickly when necessary.

In the past seven years, as a homebased freelance writer, I've traveled across the United States and Canada by jet, car, cab, Greyhound bus, and even bicycle, carrying my trusty notebook computer. In that time, I've researched and written two books, three radio plays, and magazine articles, and also attended TV producers' conferences.

Home-based professionals, in any field, are constantly doing research, finding the answers to a client's problems, interviewing a key source, or attending a conference to upgrade knowledge and skills.

If these professionals are typical, they end up with a mass of notes scribbled into a spiral-bound notepad, along with disks containing a mess of word-processor files typed and stored on the fly. They'll then take precious time to sort out what's important.

Most of the people I know use word processors to make notes. Many have a hard time finding, collating, and coordinating their entries as they research and when they've finished. Some try using the find function or creating an index before printing their notes.

For my research, I once used one of the earliest and simplest card-file PIM' s, Broderbund's MemoryMate, but my method will work with any similar software, whether for DOS, Windows 3.1, or Macintosh. For instance, I now use Info Select (Micro Logic). These indexcard programs let you store data (the amount varies with the program) on a given topic, then retrieve it by searching for certain words in the text.

THE RESEARCH PUZZLE

The high moment for any researcher is the discovery of that special gem of detail, that last piece of a puzzle.

When I began work on my last book, telling the life story of Frank Zaneth, the best undercover operative in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police during the gangster era of the 1920s and 1930s, I had never heard of a boat called the Isabel H. Nor did I know anything about a woman named Evelyn Carline.

Eve Carline was a resourceful widow; the Isabel H. was a rum-runner that plied its trade from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, down to Long Island's infamous Rum Row and as far south as the Carolinas.

I began at Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters in Ottawa, looking at old bootlegging files I had requested under the Canadian Access to Information Act. I sat in a little room, with my Toshiba notebook, examining hundreds of pages of police reports. References to names and events were scattered almost at random throughout the documents, as the Mounties held what was one of North America's first major organized crime investigations.

I divided and distilled the information. I created a separate MemoryMate card for each individual character, each important incident. The RCMP files contained lists of rum-running boats, so I created one card called Boats, a simple random list created as the names popped up in the police files.

I also created cards for other background information such as archive file numbers, phone numbers, lists of possible photographs, and interview notes from living sources.

Back in my home office, I sorted the list of boats and sent a copy to the U.S. National Archives, requesting the Coast Guard. seized-vessel files and the State Department bootlegging intelligence files on those boats. When I arrived in Washington a couple of months later, the files were waiting for me.

In the reading room overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, I set up a new card for each vessel, including the Isabel H. I added notes from the Coast Guard and State Department files to each boat's card. Often I saw a reference to the Isabel H. in files for other boats, and it took just a couple of keystrokes to call up the card for the Isabel H. It was the same when I found more information on the Isabel H. in another intelligence file.

I discovered that the Isabel H. was one of the busiest rum boats of the era, operating from Nova Scotia starting in the early 1920s. She continued to deliver booze to Long Island, New Jersey, and the Carolinas as late as 1936, three years after U.S. Prohibition ended in 1933. The Coast Guard files show the boat was suspected of smuggling drugs and transporting Chinese illegal aliens from the Caribbean to the U.S. The Isabel H. went into "legitimate trade" for a couple of years in the late 1930s, but by the end of the decade, she was smuggling again, loading liquor in the United States and smuggling it to Cape Breton to avoid taxes. When I looked at the RCMP files, the names of some people were blacked out, as usually required by freedom of information acts. I first saw the name Evelyn Carline in declassified State Department intelligence reports and so, when I was in Washington, I created a card for Evelyn Carline. Checking microfilm, I discovered the newspapers called her Eve Carline, and I added references to the news stories to her growing computer card. When all that data reached a conclusive ' level, I was able to put the piece in the puzzle, go back to the RCMP files, and fill in the blacked-out spaces.