Dispatches, digests and doodles: Exploring the significant properties of field notebooks

Abstract

Whether a first-person narrative, a structured observational data source, or simply a diary of doodles, field notebooks are the material instantiation of most site-based social and natural sciences. In this poster, we present preliminary work that explores the significant properties of field notebooks across three diverse disciplines: Paleontology, Archaeology, and Field Biology. This work is meant to supplement existing norms in digitization processes, and begin moving many of those projects towards a more general, interoperable approach to preserving the rich content held within field note collections.