NOTE: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming new book (February 2022) Master of Field Arts, the “master’s degree” workshop-in-a-book will be a companion to Nature Journaling for a Wild Life.
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Our main tool for field arts is the field journal, and there are three essential elements to its success. Fortunately each is straightforward, albeit critical to complete if your journal is to reach its potential as a reliable record for expeditions, overland travel, or scientific studies. All engineering and research laboratories have stringent guidelines for keeping lab journals—even in the digital age, written lab and field notes are preferred from a legal perspective for patent applications or peer reviews. Likewise if you are undertaking an expedition of historical or scientific significance, your field notes will be used to measure and verify your outcomes.
The essential elements are: metadata, field data, and regimen. For this post, I’m going to focus on metadata: what is it, why it’s important, and what are the best metadata to include in field notes.
Metadata
“Meta” is a Greek prefix that means “along with” or “self-referential.” Metadata is data that goes along with other data to help organize or categorize it, which makes tracking and working with it not only easier but also determines whether it will be considered an anecdote or a fact. In a field journal, metadata establishes:
These are essential for future use, by you or other naturalists, scientists, and explorers. Good field notes are worth their weight in gold to an explorer or field scientist—you can never be sure what you will need in the future when writing up your discoveries or applying for funding or an award. In short, you can never have too much metadata. Useful metadata includes:
Metadata is usually placed first in a field journal—for me, the act of drawing grids and looking up and writing down various data is a trigger for my brain to start focusing on observation and recall, and it literally “warms up” my hand through the act of drawing lines and circles and symbols (see examples above and below).
Another metadata component that is important for fieldwork and expeditions is to list your team members and their affiliations and contact information.
I love to use official NOAA weather symbols in my field notes metadata; for an in-depth discussion and lots of charts of symbols, see my Weather Data 101 tutorial at https://www.exploringoverland.com/constantapprentice/2020/6/11/metadata-101-weather
