Welcome to our work on engaging with Field Notes. I’m excited to have the chance to explore together the practice of seeing and documenting what we observe, learning more about how to look, how to see, and how to keep a detailed record of what we notice.
http://maps.unomaha.edu/Maher/deathvalley/fieldnotetaking.html
Why is this a skill worth developing? 4 arguments in response:
1) Your intellectual and visceral response to the landscape and geology can be so strong you think – “this I will not forget”. Indeed, for some, including myself, visual memories are more detailed and long lasting than others. Note taking even seems to initially interfere with appreciation and understanding of the surroundings. Note taking seems a nuisance, an impediment to experiencing. Yet, details often fade with time as they are supplanted by subsequent experiences. A detailed notebook allows you to recover that information – it is an extension of your memory, it is an important record you can later draw on. Simply rereading notes can bring back memories, images, and understanding that was otherwise lost, inaccessible in our cranial recesses until released by stimuli in the notebook. In a science built in part on experience, field notes can represent a powerful extension of the experience one can call upon.
2) As mentioned above taking notes in the field often obtrudes into the field experience. Yet, given time, when taking detailed field notes I see, understand, and remember more. It’s as if my mind is freed, by committing to paper one set of observations and ideas, to look for other nuances other patterns.
3) The more you record and observe the more likely you are to potentially recognize anomalies, and the recognition of new patterns or anomalies is the crucial first step to new insight. I suggest you record not only what is directly important to and supportive of your research and ideas, but as time permits, observe what might be related, but is not understood. Anomalies will not be apparent if you look narrowly. Writing is an important mode of exploration.
4) A final and most important reason to take detailed and extensive field notes is simply that others can benefit from your notes.