I'm glad! People keep getting intimidated when we invite them to salon, and I wish we could do something about that, because just because we're doing original archival research *now* doesn't mean we started out that way! We started out with "Who is this person??" and just kept trying to answer increasingly obscure questions that came up like "Could they have had brazilwood in the Crimea?" and we learned a lot along the way. It's about having a particular inquisitive mindset, not a particular set of background knowledge.

Also, If you think that's cute, check out this post from the beginning of salon in which cahn talks about her complete lack of knowledge and desire to find out more:

Things I knew about Frederick the Great before a year ago: he was king of... Prussia??
...
Also, there is apparently some subplot involving Russian fanboys that introduces an entirely new cast of people which I am dying to find out about

At first, Selena and I thought it would be too much to introduce a new character cast and plot to her, but she was like, "No, tell me everything!"

It wasn't long before Selena and I stopped telling her things we already knew and started telling her (and thereby each other) things we had just discovered that day.

And after enough time, we were telling her things that historians were wrong about or that had never been discovered before, i.e., original research. But we didn't start out that way!