I have done quote a bit of research for this topic (these many topics), so you might wonder how I keep it all organized. Well, thanks to my good friend and anthropologist Santiago Naranjo (http://santiagocomics.tumblr.com/),

I am using a free program called Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/).

As they put it, “Zotero is a powerful, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources and then share the results of your research.”

Here’s a snap shot of what my current collection of Maria Material looks like. The icons show what sort of material it is: book, website, etc. Double-click and it takes you to any websites you have linked. You can save PDFs, images, pretty much anything. 

I’ve tagged things by topic such as religion, guilds, modern appreciation so that I can go find all those things quickly .

You can also have multiple projects. So I have one for Maria, but also one for a comic tentatively titled “Water Lady” that has research on things like vikings because that is sort of the setting. How are their buildings made and so on. I also have one for research on dodo birds because I am doing a comic about them for the next Awesome ‘Possum (volume 3) (http://itsopossum.tumblr.com), the natural science anthology that I run. And another one on mushrooms for the comic I did for the last Awesome Possum (volume 2).