If you do any kind of research on foreign companies, it’s imperative to know how the companies are structured. Canadian businesses fall into one of four categories — sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or cooperative — and corporations usually carry the designation Inc., Corp., or Ltd. For foreign companies, there’s an array Read More
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Quick Tip Tuesday: International Investigative Research
For international due diligence and investigative research, I’ve found Investigative Dashboard to be a wonderful resource: Investigative Dashboard (ID) has been developed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the world’s leading cross border investigative reporting organization. OCCRP designed Investigative Dashboard as a transnational collaborative effort to help journalists and Read More
Searching the Past
The Internet Archive has received a lot of attention recently, and if you haven’t read this New Yorker article, I urge you to do so. If you’re not already in love with the Internet Archive, you will be after reading that piece, as well as this one titled “Never Trust a Read More
Quick Tip Tuesday: LinkedIn Activity
Ever wonder how you can see someone’s past activities on LinkedIn? While your connections’ posts and activities show up on your LI home page, when you visit someone’s page on LI, you see only their profile, not their “wall” of past posts, like on Facebook. This is somewhat hidden on Read More
Introducing Quick Tip Tuesdays
In an effort to blog more often and share more of what I know, I’m starting a new series of posts called Quick Tip Tuesday. Every Tuesday I’ll share a new research resource, a nifty search methodology, or an important lesson gleaned from my years of experience as a researcher. Perhaps Read More
More Sources of Data and Statistics
Here are a couple of additional sites to update my previous post on finding data and statistics on the open web. Knoema draws socioeconomic data from a large number of government, non-profit, academic, and corporate sources — 500 sources, in fact. The sheer size of this site makes it an Read More
Tips and Tricks for Finding Email Addresses
For a recent project I had to scour the Internet for email addresses of corporate executives. You’d think this would be a relatively easy task. After all, work email addresses are public information, and executives have assistants to sort through and filter their communication so they’re not inundated. But I Read More
More Photo Fakery
A while ago I wrote about photo fakery and the problem of verifying hoax images. Here’s a great roundup of 86 fake photos that went viral in 2014. Many of them were spread (as real) on Twitter by @HistoryInPics. The company behind the popular account recently raised $2 million from Read More
UK Investigative Research Resources
FreePint, an excellent site for research and information management resources, news, and reviews, runs a regular feature called “My Favourite Tipples,” usually written by a practitioner with expertise in a particular research niche. The latest post is by Neil Smith, a UK investigative researcher, who identifies a few indispensable tools for Read More
Photo Fakery and the Challenge of Verification
Another week, another fake photo making the rounds in social media and raising outrage and/or hilarity. This time it is a photo of a gold toilet said to have belonged to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Problem is, the photo has been around since at least 2012, and while the Ukrainian Read More