Introduction to Field Notes

In the early days of what would become the Making and Knowing Project, Founding Director Pamela Smith came to a realization: in order to remember and then write about her experiences in lifecasting, she would have to take meticulous notes. Amidst the cacophony of sounds, sights, and smells in the blacksmith’s workshop, her experimentations passed in a blur. It was only through detailed notes that she could keep everything straight. As she organized her jottings each night, she began to see these notes as a space for wider reflection, not just documentation of minute processes and results. This realization was carried over into the Project’s Laboratory Seminar. As students undertook their own multi-week historical reconstruction research, field notes became a central tool in chronicling not just the product, but the processes of making and knowing.

Befitting the Project’s interdisciplinary ethos, a unique style of field notes was developed, combining the laboratory notes of the natural sciences with ethnographic field notes from anthropology. In the Project’s early years, Joseph Ulichny (Senior Lecturer in Chemistry) and Brian Boyd (Senior Lecturer in Anthropology) would each deliver a presentation on note taking in their respective disciplines. In later years, Project team members Caroline Surman and Naomi Rosenkranz would introduce students to the process of field notes.

Laboratory notes in the natural sciences are a tool for documenting processes and results, serving as an experimental record to enable replication and validation. In fact, they are designed to be read and scrutinized by current and future peers and colleagues. Meanwhile, ethnographic field notes are a deeply personal (though no less exact) record not intended for a wider audience.

In the Making and Knowing Project, there is no one way of taking field notes. Personal preference aside, some activities will require different approaches. Voice memos, written notes, videos, or a combination of methods will all suffice. The most important thing is to take notes in any manner and with abandon, without any assumptions of what is important. Students should resist the urge to edit themselves during the notetaking phase. These initial notes will likely be disjointed and incomprehensible to anyone else. Further reflection and revisiting however, will create an important record of hands-on activity and personal experience.

But what should students record? Students in the Making and Knowing course are asked to make note of the following:

  • Introduction information including the activity’s date, location, and any lab partners (as needed).

  • Record of procedures, materials and their amounts, equipment, and results. Making and Knowing students often used the activity sheet as a baseline for recording these points and annotated with the specifics of their individual processes.

  • General observations of the process, making special note of anything unplanned or unexpected. What surprised the students? What did they expect to see and did the results differ? Did the students hold any assumptions going into the process? Failed experiments generally produce the most fruitful field notes!

  • Thought process throughout the activity including student reactions, sensory details (sights, sounds, and smells!), and overall impressions.

  • Written or audio note taking should be supplemented with video or photographs.

In addition to the in-class discussion and introduction to field notes, students were provided with:

The initial jottings taken during the activity are just the start. Field notes aren’t static, they develop and change over time and require multiple edits and passes to unleash their full value.

Within 24 hours, students should transcribe their notes, using these scribbled words or photos to jog their memory and flesh out their recollections. A mention that the “sourdough was sticky before kneading and elastic afterward” might become “sourdough was sticky at the start of the kneading process, but began to change in consistency and became more elastic as the gluten developed. Over the 10 minute kneading process, it began to feel like a living organism as opposed to a mixture of flour and water” in the final narrative (quote from Spring 2023 student Avery Lambert). Again, students should resist the urge to edit their work during this stage. At this point, too much detail is preferable to too little.

For activities that require multiple trials, longer-term work, or build upon previous activities, returning to previous field notes is critical. Students should begin to notice and mark themes. This will take multiple passes as students identify patterns. Pay special attention to anything unexpected that happened or any moment that could inspire future research or experimentation. Themes can be identified with different color highlighters or notes in the margins.

In each semesterly introduction to field notes, Project and Communications Manager Caroline Surman illustrates the necessity of numerous close readings with an example from her first ethnographic project. Among other objectives, the research considered how public perceptions of crafts influenced ceramic teachers’ views of themselves and their recreational students. In one interview, a teacher mentioned offhandedly that she blames students’ outsized expectations on the 1990s movie Ghost. In the middle of a dense interview, this odd moment was simply categorized as “reference to media” in the field notes and set aside. However, another interviewee noted the film’s enduring power and its role in driving couples to take ceramic courses. An eavesdropping waiter then interjected to proclaim the enduring power of a scene in the movie set in a ceramic studio. A pattern had emerged and prompted a new research direction. A library search provided an underlying theory to help explain that some ceramic teachers believed Ghost had invalidated their profession and rendered it little more than a date-night activity. This line of research questioning or insight would have never occurred without careful analysis of field notes.

While some students may initially view the field note assignments as busy work or overly involved for what is technically a history seminar, their value is reinforced throughout the course. Field notes serve a variety of purposes both throughout the semester and beyond. Even though only a small section of the field notes might appear in the final project, they often act as the invisible foundation providing the raw data and initial analysis that will underpin the student’s theoretical argument and conclusions. Moreover, field notes become the basis of class discussion, referenced as students recount their experiences and connect them to readings, previous class discussions, and their classmate’s experiences. They also function as a tool for tracking student progress and providing feedback. Making and Knowing instructors regularly reviewed field notes, leaving comments and suggestions for potential research avenues, relevant background reading, or requests for additional information. In fact, field notes acted as the final compilation of a student’s laboratory work (which amounted for 30% of the grade).

Student field notes are archived (first in Google Drive and then in the public Field Notes website) and frequently consulted by later students, creating linkages across semesters and yearly themes. This form of asynchronous peer-learning offers multiple benefits. It enables successive “generations” of students to learn from, empathize with, and build upon the work of their earlier peers. For some students, previous field notes act as a sort of Making and Knowing search repository and the natural first resource for any questions they may have. Previous field notes also reinforce the importance of failure. For some students, any disappointing result is seen as a personal failing and a warning of a low final grade. In these instances, students can turn to past field notes and discover how unsuccessful experiments have never doomed a student to a failing grade. Instead, they often prompt some of the Project’s most cherished insights.

Beginning Summer 2021, the Making and Knowing Project transitioned from a four-hour graduate class that took place exclusively in the M&K laboratory to a two-hour undergraduate and graduate seminar that was primarily discussion-based. No longer were students expected to produce publication-ready essays that could be included in the Project’s digital critical edition. Additionally, the shorter available time and the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted remote work with students undertaking reconstruction activities from their own apartments or dorm rooms. No longer could students and Project teachers work together in the laboratory. Field notes became a lifeline as students conducted their experiments in their own homes.

This necessitated a change in the structure and nature of field notes, which were expanded to include further reflection and self-evaluation and amounted to 35% of the student’s final grade. As opposed to submitting field notes on each hands-on activity, students were required to complete the following:

  • Participation and Presence Goals. Students were asked to complete this after the second class meeting and were encouraged to frequently return to this document and annotate it with any updates or insights that could be expanded upon in the midterm and final reflections. Students detailed

    • What drew them to the course
    • What they hoped/expected to learn
    • What aspects seemed most challenging

  • Bread Molding and Making Reflection. Students took field notes over this multi-week process that began at home and concluded with the first lab session of semester. Students were asked to contemplate

    • How their process and procedure changed over the break-making and molding experience
    • What they would have done differently (especially given the two remaining lab sessions in the semester)
    • What was expected
    • What outside knowledge (either lived experience or academic) influenced their reconstruction

  • Midterm Participation and Presence Reflection. Halfway through the semester, students returned to their initial reflection. They were asked to consider

    • How their goals had changed
    • What had been the most challenging
    • What had surprised them about the course
    • If there was any additional information they wanted to share with the instruction team

  • Final Participation and Presence Reflection. Students were asked

    • What they would take away from the course
    • If they felt they had reached their identified goals
    • If and how their final project helped to integrate course themes

Field notes have remained a throughline across the many years of Making and Knowing. As a pedagogical tool, they created another avenue for students and faculty to synthesize the reading and hands-on aspects of the course and build upon prior insights.

Information is partially sourced from: