How to Research in the Age of AI
Taught by Sarah Lohman
Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling books Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods and Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of food as a way to access the stories of diverse Americans. Endangered Eating was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon’s Editors, Food & Wine, and Adam Gopnik on the Milk Street podcast. It was a finalist for the Nach Waxman Prize for Food & Drink Scholarship and winner of the Ohioana Library Book Prize for Nonfiction. Lohman’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. Lohman has lectured across the country, from the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, DC to The Culinary Historians of Southern California
In this primer on researching, we'll cover:
- How to do an effective Google search, remove AI features, and dig into Google's lesser-known databases.
- What AI tools are effective and worth the money
- How to spot a good source and verify it, as well as fact check a bad one.
- How to check that an image or video is real, not AI generated
- How to access academic articles and scientific studies (and why you should).
- How to find historical figures using Ancestry.com and Newspaper databases.
- When you need to go to the library or the archive (and when you don’t).
In this class, you'll learn all the skills you need to research non-fiction, look up information for your next novel, and even how to find the truth behind a suspicious social media post.
