bureaucracy
A segment of the enormous file
As office buildings grew taller, and flammability became a problem, steel file cabinets replaced wooden ones – the tall cabinets mimicking the shape of the skyscraper, such that the “file” seemed to be a metaphorical stand-in for the office itself. “Each office within the skyscraper,” C. Wright Mills would argue some years later, “is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbolic factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.” Aldous Huxley, in his dystopian novel Brave New World, could imagine no more powerful symbol of a totally bureaucratized world than the idea of each person having his or her name on a file.
Each fascinating crisis
The problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day they already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to recreate the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity.
An enormous machine
The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.
Unborable
The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
Institutional structure
'That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn't realize, or like they couldn't realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn't a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution.'
The Pale King
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Dolor
A Poem by Theodore RoethkeI have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.
Letters to the Future
The lapse of many years
At this point I wish to emphasize what I believe will ultimately prove to be the greatest purpose of our museum. This value will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved. And this is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west, wherever we now work. He will know the proportional constituency of our faunae by species, the relative numbers of each species and the extent of the ranges of species as they exist today.
— Joseph Grinnell, 1910
The Grinnell System
The recording of field notes was common practice for biological surveyors and naturalists generations before Grinnell. His system continues this tradition but is distinguished by its distinctive standardized format. It consists of three sections:
- The journal contains a narrative account describing the study site and summarizing each day’s activities and observations, including a list of species encountered. This section is often peppered with sketches, photographs, or maps.
- The catalog is a sequential record of all voucher specimens collected, each with a unique field number and the information needed for the specimen’s museum tag, such as its sex, mass, breeding status, and standard body measurements.
- Species accounts are species-specific summaries of information and observations, gradually accumulated over multiple days at a site or across multiple sites, that eventually grow to detailed summaries of physical description, seasonal behaviors, microhabitat associations, and other characteristics.
Separating the notebook in this fashion allows each section to have its own context-specific structure and format.
Jim's system
From the earliest days of my fieldwork until now, throughout a given day I jotted notes, typically in pencil, into a small, spiral-bound pocket notebook, remembering the admonition not to trust one’s memory but to record observations as continually as possible. I then transcribes these notes into my handwritten journal in the evenings on the best of days or every few days when an intense field effort allowed.
From 2000 onward, I would still takes pencil notes in a small pocket notebook in the field, but I transcribes these into a word-processor document with margins set for the size of our field note pages. I combined this document with my field catalog for a particular trip and eventually both would be bound in the same manner as standard, handwritten field notes.
This approach had the advantage of producing both an archival paper copy as well as an electronic copy. It was also easy to intersperse specialized maps and digital photographs, which had become the norm by this time, throughout the journal text.
John's system
I have two field notebooks: a “raw" notebook and my formal Grinnellian notebook.
In the field, I take all my raw notes in a waterproof notebook using a fine-point permanent pen (or pencil when its raining). The entries have virtually no structure other than the date at the top of (almost) every page.
At the end of the day, I transcribe the notes into my Grinnellian journal as if I were writing a latter to a colleague.
Record them all
You can’t tell often in advance which observations will prove valuable. Do record them all!
— Joseph Grinnell, 1908
Recommendations for field notes
Being an end-user of someone else’s field notes certainly gives you insight into the benefits of good note-taking skills. Our experiences as end-users and creators of archival field notes lead us to a few specific recommendations:
(1) Don’t get bogged down in the details of format or style.
Rules are counterproductive if they prevent a researcher from taking field notes in the first place.
You will get more return by focusing on your content than by refining your formatting.
(2) Compose your notes as if you were writing a letter to someone a century in the future.
Writing for an external audience requires you to be more explicit in your descriptions and to take less knowledge for granted. Avoid the use of abbreviations, symbols, and other shortcuts that only you will understand.
Ask yourself: How would you describe this to someone over the phone?
(3) It is better to spend five minutes writing the important details than twenty minutes writing the trivial ones.
Field notes
Field notes example.
Camp's notes
Grinnell-era field notes example, Charles L. Camp.