Keep your contact information in a prominent location.
Write for yourself and for posterity.
Write pertinent field information with every new entry. You should enter the date, time, and location at the top of every page.
Add information on your location.
Record your methods.
Make backup copies.
If you use abbreviations, make sure there is a key in your field notebook.
Don’t leave home without it.
Form a writing habit. Thomas Jefferson was such an inveterate chronicler of daily events in his notebooks that he even took the time to record the weather four times on the day he helped write the Declaration of Independence. So unless you have something far more pressing than writing the Declaration of Independence, you have no excuse for avoiding your field notebook!
Set up a structure for your field notebook.
Create an index.
Treat your field notebook like a scrapbook. You should view your field notebook as a central clearinghouse for miscellaneous information that is relevant to your research project. If there are related bits of information that you will find useful later on, sketch them, write them down, photocopy them, and staple or tape them in your notebook.
On the early web, there were thousands and thousands more personal homepages than weblogs.
Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)
Not all that many readers go to the back matter and look up the source for a single sentence. But the back matter can also be read as ordinary text, revealing a history of content and sources. And images and illustrations from the book in the back matter create a lovely visual/verbal summary quilt of the entire book, enjoyed by all.
Directories aren’t surging. There isn’t this nascent directory movement fomenting - ready to take on the world. Directories aren’t trending.
But there is a certainly really sweet little directory community now. From the Marijn-inspired stuff listed in Directory Uprising to the link-sharing ‘yesterweb’ collected around sadgrl.online - or the originals at Indieseek and i.webthings.
Barnsworthburning (by Nick Trombley) is a very formidable addition to this community - a clean, multilayered design and an innovative bidirectional index.
Ethnographic studies are distinct from ethological research in other species because we can speak with our subjects and ask them questions. This has tremendous value, but much of what humans do is not spoken, and we also observe, count, and measure.
Accurately capturing how people spend their time is contingent not only on systematic data collection, but also on participants moving in a relaxed and normal manner through their daily activities. Just as primatologists habituate their subjects to their presence, anthropologists first must develop rapport and trust with the communities in which they live.
Scan samples and focal follows are two commonly used behavioral observation methods.
During a scan sample, randomly selected individuals are located at specified time intervals, usually every ten to fifteen minutes, and the observer instantaneously records what the participant is doing.
Focal follows complement scan samples by documenting the continuous sequence of an individual's activities. During a focal follow, each subject is observed over a period of several hours with each change in activity recorded with a start and stop time.
In most traditional societies children help care for their younger siblings. However, it is often the case that a child minding his younger sibling does so out of the corner of his eye while playing with other children. Is this play or child care?
I organized behavioral codes to contain several levels of information. As in this example, if a child is outside playing with friends while minding her two-year-old sister, the activity was coded as 675: the 600 signifies noneconomic activity, the 70 that it is playing, and the 5 that it is playing while in charge of a child. All activities were coded in this way. A nested classificatory hierarchy preserves both detail for future research and flexibility to lump or disaggregate activities for analyses. This method of nesting information carries over into many kinds of coding and classificatory schemes.
Because they live so successfully in their world, we expect our subjects to readily explain the strategies that underlie the behaviors we observe. This can be trying, because from their point of view we are asking the obvious, a child’s question.