Two days ago, I was at Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung with a group of students from Parami and from here in Taiwan, running a workshop on field notes. It was one of those rare occasions when we get the chance to meet face-to-face, and so felt like a really precious opportunity.
We talked about a lot of things. But the main thing was this: take notes! If you don’t take notes, you will forget. Even if something feels important at the time, you will forget. Making notes either in situ, or else at the end of a long day of research and reading, is a way of capturing your thoughts and ideas, a way of consolidating your knowledge, and a way of recording both what is happening objectively, and your own subjective responses. Once you start building a rich body of field notes, these can be put to work in later writing and research.
One thing we didn’t get a chance to talk about was the best way of storing these notes. I do keep notebooks, but I rarely look back at older notebooks. For more stable (and searchable) notes, I use plain text (in Markdown format, which is what this site uses), and keep my notes bundled up in an Obsidian vault, which means that I can make connections between the notes, and keep track of them.
But it’s important to find your own way. Here are a few things to think about if you are coming up with a system of your own:
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How important is it to you that your notes are searchable?
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Are the notes going to be in a format that you can access in 1 year’s time, or 5, or 10, or 25 years’ time?
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Are your notes secure? Some free apps may use your data to target advertising, for example. And there are also legal responsibilities to keep research notes about identifiable individuals secure.
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Does your note-keeping system encourage you to write notes, or does it get in the way? Some fancy methods may seem cool at first, but are just too complex for everyday use.
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Are your notes stored in multiple places? Are they safe from fire, flood, forgetfulness and other natural disasters? When I did fieldwork in the 1990s in Indonesia, I wrote in notebooks, but used [carbon paper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_paper) to make back-up copies that I then mailed home to the UK.