Field Notes

While looking for how other people write about their adventures I stumbled on the Grinnell system of Field Notes, which is a structured journaling method natural scientists use to document their outings. I adopted Field Notes because it offers powerful benefits.

Field Notes data

• Date (D.Month.Y)
• Location (LOC ###) and route used if not using an MIR.
• Activity (MIR ###)
• Weather: Atmospherics and sometimes astrometrics.
• Physical state: Hungry, cold, sleepy, ready. Where I am in my body tends to impact my experiences.
• Emotional state: Happy, sad, restless, tired? When I started to put my feelings to words I began owning them and how they affect my work. It is from this point that I begin to really establish my personal experience as narrated through the Narrative but made more useful to personal insights through the Reflections because I am exposing some of my internal challenges to objectivity.
• Participants: Names and a brief idea of who they are unless already stated in previous notes.
• Duration of Observation: Arrival time in 24 hour format. Duration hours noted in whole numbers followed by fifteen minute increments placed right of the decimal. Two hours and a half = 2.5, three hours and 40 minutes = 3.75, etc.
• Narrative: A linear description of what happened. The expectation is that the author describes ONLY what they directly experience with their senses. Avoiding assumption is a great strength of this method because it begins to lay bare just how shallow our knowledge, even of our familiar world, can be. That said I do occasionally make inferences, and I try to remember to note them as such, wherever it might make my notes easier to follow. It is through the of writing what we see, through text and sketches, that builds our powers of observation, in detail and depth.
  
  If using a paper-based Field Journal, begin each page with the location of the entry in the top left corner of the page, underlined with a wavy line. Each entry should be made consecutively, do not start a new page just for a new entry, simply skip a line. Each page should have your name and year in the top left corner (above the location) and be numbered. Record the Narrative in complete sentences using only one side of each page allowing the opposing side to be used for sketches and maps. If you are recording and cataloging nature, the species name should be underlined with a straight line and the common name should be underlined with a wavy line.
• Reflections: This is my own addition to standard Field Notes. By Reflections I mean try to recall what you felt in the moment, creating a second narrative timeline that is a documentation of your feelings as reflected by the events in your Narrative. This allows us to interrogate our own reactions to things and sometimes provides a glimpse into our own discourse in action.
• Questions: Richard Phillips Feynman, an American physicist and intellectual, kept a notebook of things he did not know about a subject when exploring it. Questions generated from Field Notes are copied into a Collection of Questions to be answered if possible. Incorporating Feyman’s notebook method into the Grinnell system allows civilians an organic insight into the construction and accumulation of knowledge.

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Grinnell System Components

The Grinnell system was created to organize note taking about naturalist field work so as to provide lasting value to scientists, students of nature and museums.

Field Notebook

A small notebook to keep Field Notes in during an outing. Just how small as well as other particular features depend on your taste and willingness to spend. Rite N Rain produces purpose built field notebooks that seem to be popular.

Field Journal

The larger and non-mobile ledger, after each excursion the notes you have written into the Field Notebook are copied into the Field Journal. 

Species Account

A composite of material from your Field Notes pertaining to a specific species. These provide a specialized perspective of important species specific encounters over the course of creating the Field Journal. 

Catalog

An index of where and when specimens were collected, harkening back to the Victorian era practice of amassing significant quantities of dead things to study. 

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Quest craft

Over the years I’ve found that every major turn of exploration has been accompanied by some kind of article that, however quietly, was central to its time. My questing system is for designing, executing and reviewing Urban Exploration adventures. A Quest in this case is defined as a set of individual Missions aligned together to form a consistent narrative for whatever purpose the quest writer has defined.

This system is essentially the Grinnell system with a few more components added for the sake of alignment and logistics. The Grinnell system assumes a scientist who knows what they are trying to do, why they are doing it, and they work with colleagues and institutions where the process of getting people on the same page has been worked out to a degree. My new components grew organically over the length of years to communicate details to people who may not share the same expectations or skill set , so there is a degree of modularity owing to that each part of the whole has had to stand on its own.

• Proposal: a summary of the Quest. Hard to do but very useful for checking to see if you really have a story worth telling as well as selling other explorers on the idea.
• Location file: a standardized article about the history of a location based on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s historic conservation forms.
• Mission Intelligence Report: Itinerary for a single exploration adventure.
• Output: The general term used to describe an object outlined in the Proposal, selected or created throughout the quest. I often refer to this as the MacGuffin.

Proposal

For the sake of completeness there are a few more steps one might want to consider when crafting a quest such as writing a proposal. I think a proposal is essential for a quest because it sets boundaries around what is really important, but it is overkill for just a mission or set of missions without a consistent narrative. I use a modified Amazon 6 page memo format for my proposals, which are demanding to write, but which are the most effective and efficient type of proposals I’ve found. These will demand that you choose a MacGuffin, or thing that you want to create or find through this quest.

As we age it seems to me our time gets more expensive. I couldn’t imagine seeing the relevance of this paperwork 20 years ago, but these days it is quite necessary for me to justify the quest time I ask for, even of friends. I can show this proposal to other adventurers I might want to tag along or specialists whose talents I may need.

Location

Site specific research documents such a Massachusetts Historical Form A (for an area) or Form B (for a building) are helpful because I usually intend to write about my explorations. I’ve found it best to get started on the research before the adventure starts because the history of a site can help inform me as to what is especially important to experience. If the site is one I intend to return to I may begin to uncover questions in the writing between the historical research and my Field Notes.

My experience is that you tend to get what you give when it comes to work. It is easy to glorify fun, even if it hasn’t been earned. It is also easy to glorify work even when it is merely blind adherence. Typically writing and reading, spending time on site and asking informed questions are good general guides to successful adventures, in my opinion, for which this system is meant to provide a basic framework.

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References

Historical Urbex Materials

1. Hand-drawn map of the asylum, 1996
2. The first BTR MIR, 2001

On Field Notes

• How to increase your powers of observation, Time Magazine
• Field Notes in Science and Nature, a book edited by Ed Canfield
• From Everyday to Scientific Observation: How Children Learn to Observe the Biologist’s World, an article by Catherine Eberbach and Kevin Crowley

Grinnell System

• Donna Long has an approachable and detailed description of the Grinnell system components.
• Gorilla Scholar provides another approachable overview of the Grinnell system.

Richard Phillips Feynman‘s notebook method

• Cal Newport has a brief overview of their emploment of Feynman’s notebook method.
• Wikipedia’s article on Feynman‘s incredible life.

Appendices