Note-taking, Journaling, Recording

Note-taking helped transform me from a young boy on barefoot runs who passively observed the tangled bank of the Maine woods into a naturalist-scientist who is an active participant in unraveling the mysteries of the natural world.

Leonardo wrote in his notebooks backwards, from right to left, so that they had to be held up to a mirror to be read.
In a manner of speaking, the image of Leonardo’s notebooks would be more real than the notebooks themselves.

Methodically noting and filing resources is a sign of a mature and deliberate craftsman—it is an investment into future learning and projects. Before long, you will begin to reach the point where this collection generates projects and ideas with minimal effort; previously isolated ideas are consolidated and curiousity spurred on.

A three-layered process of documentation:

(1) First, there is the field notebook. This is where the actual numbers are recorded, together with passing observations relevant to the interpretation of these numbers.

Paper is still proving more durable than electronic data.

(2) The journal is a parallel record to that of the notebook—a daily account of events, thoughts, and observations.

(3) Last of the three strata, then, are the publications. Traditionally, in science, these are articles in academic journals leavened with chapters in books. To be successful, a young scientist need aspire to no more than these two forms of output together with their oral versions at interminable conferences and meetings of learned societies.

There came a time in my scientific development, however, when other forms of publication became important: magazines articles, and writing books.

Journals are memory prompts and perhaps capture exquisite (and not so exquisite) moments of experience.

From my records, research questions emerged that I never expected when I was making them.

Scientific illustrations can achieve certain things that photographs cannot. A good illustration can portray difficult-to-photograph or rarely witnessed events. It can incorporate everything that’s important into one single image or show a special view of a subject.

It would be next to impossible to observe, in nature, a dozen different aquatic species in their natural habitat, posing perfectly together and all in focus at one time—but such a scene can easily come to life in an illustration.

Now that we are in the era of personal computers, traditional field books are being replaced by computer files. By default such “field books” are sterile creatures—all the words are spelled properly, the location data are exact to a matter of a few feet, and everything is properly formatted. In the spring of 1998, I penciled my last entry into my signature field book with the bright orange cover. Thereafter I have maintained a computer-based field book.

Oh, all the right stuff is there, clear, crisp and, well, dull… I tend to be overly particular about it—the format has to be right, everything properly spelled, the descriptive sequence in the proper order, and even the observations drafted with the final publication in mind (rather than what I happen to see at the moment). The emotions of finding something new, once mentioned in my handwritten field books, are now missing, as if my mental editor says “no, that is not proper for a scientific journal.”

The most useful and interesting notebooks of field biology are hybrids; as well as recording details and data of field research, they record the observations, thoughts, musings, and peregrinations of the author.

Another value of field notebooks is their ability to serve as an incredibly fertile incubator for your ideas and observations. By jotting down interesting observations, questions, and miscellaneous ideas, your field notebook can serve as a powerful catalyst for new experiments and projects.

In our use of digital and analogue filing tools, we classify information through folders. An article about railway construction gets filed under ‘infrastructure’ or ‘transport’. In Evernote we tag it with ‘rail’ or ‘construction’. This is thinking like a librarian and not like a writer. We are classifying the information as an input. The reason you take notes as a writer is to produce content. It makes sense, then, to take notes in line with this goal.

Traditional filing like this tends to fail when you attempt to write your content. You are stuck trying to figure out which categories will be relevant for your proposal, paper or blog post. Interesting writing often comes from connecting separate fields through a common idea. By revealing the common denominator. By unifying two seemingly-contradictory ideas. How can you possibly achieve this if you’re looking in the same category for your information? The categories simply do not fulfil the function required by the writer.

The notes you take and indeed, the way you process information, should be with a specific project or idea in mind. You must classify information in terms of its outputs. When you take notes on a book, think about how this could apply to a specific idea you had or how it argues against a paper you read last week. The premise is that you should be organising by context and always trying to connect the dots between the content you’re consuming.