Do you ever find yourself doing research on a person where you have a name and a lot of biographical information, but no real direction for searching? Biography Buckets is for you. Biography Buckets takes biographical events or keywords associated with a person and uses them to build date-based searches across the following Web resources: Google News, Google Scholar, Google Books (Magazines Only), Google Books (Newspapers Only), Twitter, Reddit (via SocialGrep) and Newspapers.com. Twitter, Reddit, and to a lesser extent Google News are only suitable for searches spanning ~2010 and later.
First, choose the person you want to search and the resource you want to search:
Then list the search terms you want to include in your search of this person. These terms can include where they went to school, spouses, names of notable works, where they lived, etc. You can even include generic terms that are frequently associated with the person, like “vaccine” in this example.
Finally, choose the time spans that you want to run searches for and click the “Generate Search URLs” button. Experiment with different span lengths — in the case of Jonas Salk, for example, maybe you do a thirty-year search to cover his early life, do a somewhat shorter search that spans the time between his education and the polio vaccine, do a very short two-year search focused on the vaccine era, etc.
Biography Buckets will generate the search links with each date-bounded search term going in its appropriate time span(s) query along with the name of the person for whom you’re searching. Click on the link and it’ll open in a new tab.
