Specific archive finds as “Rabbit Hole Invitations”

On a particular type of news article/magazine piece you may find when trawling archives and online database, that take you on OTHER documents…  I need to come up with a decent name for these

• “Rabbit Hole Invitations” (but anything can do an RHI, if you want it to!)
• “Signposters”
• “Threads to pull on”
• Something else?

They might be newspaper or magazine articles, and they refer to documents/reports/whatever (might be a TV show, radio programme I suppose) that the journalist is using to well, Phil space. He/she gives you enough detail to whet, but not sate, your appetite. If you’re lucky, there will be enough info for them to lead on to specific articles you can track down. These give you a much richer sense of what is going on – fleshing out the backstory to things.

I can think of two RTHI examples at present (others will float back into view,, and after this I’m sensitised to it and will spot them everywhere.

One was from The Times, and a long long time ago. The journo mentioned four articles that had recently appeared in a publication aimed at employees of a big oil company, on the vexed question of pollution (presumably he was on the distro list too) And I’ve been able to figure out what that publication was, and – crucially – where I might be able to access paper copies…  

The other was an article from an August 1977  issue New Scientist which mentioned two “new” reports. I think I had read before, but not really understood the significance of it. You sometimes need to read something several times, at different periods, to grok the significance. And some things won’t become significant until you have a lot more background information. (Spy thrillers hinge on this – the one piece of the jigsaw puzzle that changes the shape/meaning of the entire thing…)

So, I “had” to go and track these two down. One as an Annual Report of the Met Office. I discovered that it was available online, and it led to more annual reports to download and think about having as a source of info May download the lot and try to do a textual analysis?).  

The other thing mentioned in the New Scientist article was a couple of NERC reports on climate change and its impacts. (I started on that journey that found me this article because I was inrigued by an offhand comment in Boehmer-Christiansen 1995.) These NERC articles I will get at my next trip to the British Library.

And that, kids, is how I disappeared further and further into archives, instead of, you know, actually writing.