- [Nicole] Hello everyone, welcome to the first lesson here. We're gonna be looking at Getting Clear. So having worked for Corporate Watch for a few years now, I've learned that it's really important in advance to know what you wanna research and kind of the structure you're gonna follow to prevent overwhelm basically. So I've got a little picture of a wormhole here. 

I don't know about you, but if you've ever been on the internet and then you just look at your watch, and you've been there for three hours looking at everything under the sun, and you've got a million tabs open and you're not going anywhere fast. That's really what we want to avoid. 

So we wanna develop systems for ourselves so that we can save time, kind of efficiently use our energy, and ultimately have more effective research. If some of you are organizers, or you're resisting a project, or you're campaigning about something, you'll know that time is really scarce, right? And we need to be efficient. We need to find the information we need for the reasons that we're clear about so that we can have an impact faster. And ultimately this is about preventing burnout. Can be very frustrating if you've spent days and days on the computer trying to find something out, and then you realize it was a bit of a waste of time which is, I think we can all put our hands up for that. 

So one of the best strategies you can use is just setting really clear goals for yourself. And there's nothing fancy about this. This isn't a kind of academic, really clear research question or something. This is literally making a list of what you want to find out. So okay, we're fighting a landlord. We wanna know who the landlord is. Does he own any other companies? Where are his offices based? That's all we really need for that campaign, so that's what I'm gonna focus on. And that will really help prevent overwhelm and prevent loads of hours spent on unnecessary research. So you might wanna go through that list and figure out what's important. And potentially what is less important, maybe you categorize them or you put them in high priority, medium priority, low priority. Whatever you do, just develop a system for yourself so that you can prioritize your time. 

And then you wanna look at how you can structure that research to prevent overwhelm. So are you gonna have that in a folder? Are you're gonna have a checklist? Are you gonna have a working group where you kind of divide up who's doing what? What's your structure gonna be? And finally before you start researching, it's really important to find out what has already been done before. You might have an ambitious research project. Like, "Oh, we're gonna map out all the detention centers in the UK and we're gonna find out how much people are getting paid inside, and it's prison labor." And then you realize that actually Corporate Watch have done a report on it or some other group have. So yeah, before you even get started, just figure out what's already done before to save yourself some time. 

Okay, and now we're gonna look at managing information. So fortunately now we've got the internet, so good things and bad things. But ultimately you're gonna potentially have a lot of websites, a lot of website links, hyperlinks. And you're gonna need to track them some way, so maybe you bookmark them. Maybe you use a tool like Zotero which I'll talk about in a minute. But just find some simple way of keeping track of the links that you're looking at. And you also wanna keep a record of sources. So if you've had a conversation with someone and they've told you something interesting, write that down in a notebook and keep it. Write who told you when. If you've read an article in the "Independent" or something that's particularly of interest, just make a note of which one you read and yeah, just try and keep a record of those sources. And ultimately try and keep a record of the things that you found, right? There's nothing worse than potentially finding something incredibly useful for a campaign and then not being able to retrieve it or needing to look through a million PDFs to find it. 

So some of the systems you can use for this kind of thing is again, just simple, simple, simple. That's what I really wanna communicate with this course is this stuff isn't rocket science and there are ways to make it really manageable for you to do this research. So when I'm doing a profile for a campaign or working on a particular project, just a new folder. Put it on your desktop of your computer. Anything you download, just remember to drop it in there. Put all your documents, just try and keep them all in the same place. You can use online tools to store information. So a really good one that we use is called Crabgrass which is developed by Riseup which is a kind of digital technology collective of kind of radicals and anarchists and stuff who've tried to develop good infrastructure for people to use to organize with. And Crabgrass is a way of creating pages. You can upload files, you can have galleries. It's a little bit like a Google Drive, but not Google thankfully. So I'll often have Crabgrass page. And then every time I'm online, I just very quickly copy and paste whatever I'm looking at into that Crabgrass page. And that's a really good way of tracking the links. Or Rich from Corporate Watch, he just has a document on his desktop and he copies and pastes everything into the document. So that's very simple too. Obviously people have developed systems, right? For this stuff, so there's a good tool called Zotero which is a bookmarking system. So you can bookmark saved websites and you can tag them with different things. So you might tag them with goldmine, or tag them with detention, or tag them with news or whatever. It's a really good way of again managing bookmarks, managing a lot of information. 

And then if some of you are students you might be familiar with referencing software. So there's one for example called citethisforme.com, and it's just like a bibliography tool. So you can copy and paste your references in there like the books you've read, or the articles you've read online, or the podcasts you've listened to you. And that's again just really simple strategy for staying on top of what you're finding and where you found it. But finally just keep it simple. So everyone at Corporate Watch has their own strategies. Some people for example like to have huge bits of paper, and unreadable handwriting, and just kind of scribble it all over. Other people have a notebook which they write stuff in. I personally like using the computer. 

But whatever strategy you develop, just keep it simple. Keep it for you and your brain and how you like to organize information. But just yeah, to make the rest of the course easier, I really suggest you now to create a desktop on your folder where you're gonna put your research files in. Maybe create a document so you can keep that record of links and just yeah, whatever you do, try and track this stuff from the beginning. Trust me, it's a lot easier than at the end. So yeah, a couple of top tips. So you might design your own templates and checklists to follow. So in the resources section of this lesson, I've included a company profile template which we use with Corporate Watch. Obviously we're doing very thorough research and long profiles for people, but might not be necessary for you. But you might create your own checklist that you need to follow. Another thing I do is I often write on post-it notes and I stick them to my computer to remind me of what I'm meant to be looking at. So I might just have one saying shareholders and stick it on my computer. And it's like okay, Nicole, you're just looking for shareholders right now. Don't worry about anything else. You could set an alarm on your phone to keep you focused. If you have a tendency of diving down the internet wormhole then that might be a good way to keep you on track. 

Some people like having a sort of accountability partner or a group that will kind of yeah, keep them motivated. So if you're doing... If you have a research working group as part of the campaign, it might be for example that you say, "Right, okay, we're gonna meet next Wednesday. And by that date, Tony's done this thing, Jane's done this thing." Whatever, you've got a little clear list of what you're doing, and that's a good way of keeping the research contained and achievable. Yeah, or you might have a whiteboard or make a mind map. Again, whatever works for you, whatever's your style of storing information. Just yeah, design a system and make it work. And one of the best ways I think for research is to make it kind of easier and automatic for us. So it can be quite time-consuming, so there's really great tools on the internet. So one of them is Google alerts. And these are something where basically you can sign up online with a search term and every time that search terms come up, it will email you. So within my role at Corporate Watch over the years, one of the main things I've been researching is prison expansion. And there's various new prison builds all around the country, and I don't have time every week to kind of troll Google for that information. So I created some Google alerts for myself and that way I get notified whenever there's a new news article about HMP Wellingborough or the prison in Lester for example. And yeah, it's just simple. Take you five minutes to set up but can help things come to you. 

You can also join newsletters. So signing up for emails, getting it into your inbox, getting it to come to you is really useful. You can sign up for alerts for things like planning applications, and you can subscribe to magazines which we'll talk about a bit later, some of the different trade magazines available. But that's a really good way of... Yeah, kind of it coming to you and you being having to be less active in finding it out. 

Okay, so finally evaluating sources. So you're gonna be throughout this course looking at all different sites for information. And it's really useful if people have kind of critical skills around the kind of sources we're coming. So looking at that news article and thinking do you trust this source? Is it good research? Have they done it thoroughly? Are they quoting adequate statistics? Is there a chance it could be quote, unquote fake news? Who is this kind of piece of writing talking to? So if it's more of a kind of right wing conservative newspaper, they might be framing statistics in a certain way to communicate something racist or horrible. For example about people crossing the channel, they might use statistics in a certain way to paint a certain picture whereas a different source might not interpret the information in that way. So yeah, just trying to understand the kind of agenda of that piece of material. I think we can probably all agree that objectivity is a myth. We definitely don't believe in Corporate Watch that we're putting out some sort of objective research. We see our research as part of supporting grassroots campaigns and struggles and struggles against corporate power. So for us, that's our agenda, right? When we're writing articles. But yeah, when you're reading sources, when you're looking at newspapers and things, just try and think critically about what's their agenda and how accurate is that information? And it's always valuable to crosscheck something. So good writers will include links to their sources and you can have a look yourself at a particular report or a set of data or something, that's really important. Okay, so that's it on this lesson. Thank you.