| Note-taking |
| There are many manuals concerned with study techniques, some more useful than others.
The note-taking method described below is based on Tony Buzan's book, 'Use your head'(1982), which covers speed reading and memorization as well as note-taking. I have found his techniques extremely useful in my own work. However, there are other effective systems |
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| which can improve a reader's efficiency in making written summaries. Whether this
particular method suits you or not, it is an example of the techniques which are available. Note-taking is a personal form of writing, and, like some of the early writing systems discussed above, it is mnemonic. Although the notes need not be comprehensible for anyone other than the note-taker, they must summarize that reader's understanding of, and response to, the works upon which time has been invested, in a way which will remind the reader of the contents of the work when the notes are reviewed months or years later. |
| Why neat, regimented notes are Bad |
| A neatly laid out page, filled with tidy dense writing may be an old-fashioned school
teacher's dream. However, it is not the most efficient representation of the argument or discussion written. As the structure of the ideas is not linear and sequential, so the layout of one's notes should not be forced into a linear mould. The page is a two dimensional surface upon which a wide variety of marks can be made. Buzan proposes that notes should be made in the form of 'mind maps'. These are created by linking keywords in a matrix which reflects the interrelated ideas in the text. A mind map looks much like the not entirely serious conceptual map of computers sketched above (diagram qqq). The first rule is to write not sentences but keywords. The argument laid out in the text should be reduced to a set of salient terms and phrases. The process of choosing these keywords should concentrate the reader's mind on the matter in hand, which in itself will help to fix the work in the reader's memory. It is not sufficient simply to string the keywords out in a linear way. The inventiveness of the human mind is such that we can always concoct a story to fit a sequence of terms (which, incidentally, is one of the main tricks in remembering complicated lists). However, we write notes so that when we come back to them we can recreate the one particular story on which the notes were made. Here the idea of the conceptual map comes in. Key words should not be regimented in straight, orderly lines, but spaced across the page. The position of the words on the page, and the relationship of one branch to another, should reflect parts of the argument. Buzan recommends that mind maps start with a box in the centre of the page containing the title of the work. Branch lines with subheadings written on them should be added for each section of the work. Where text in different sections of the work interrelate, this is reflected by lines |
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| Chapter Six: Manual for working anthropologists |
| Word processing - making texts Despite the importance of visual material (which I discuss below) anthropology remains a text oriented discipline. To a large extent anthropology consists of the consumption of texts (reading) and of their production (writing). Other activities such as the conduct of anthropological fieldwork are relegated, on this account, to an insignificant footnote. Whatever one thinks of such a perspective, writing is a critical activity that all anthropologists have to perform. Many anthropologists nowadays use computers only as word processors. This is common in many disciplines: computers are used for nothing else and many people confuse their computer with the particular word processing package that runs on it ('my computer is word perfect' is a common symptom of this type of simplified model). In this section I try and explain some of the different and useful things that the use of word processors facilittates. As soon as texts have been entered into a word processor many things become possible: blocks of text can be moved around, the sequence of paragraphs altered at a whim and then changed back. To a generation raised with word processors this may seem unremarkable, so it must be emphasised how revolutionary this is - first of all it is easy to correct typing mistakes - I am typing this myself and the original is full of mistakes since I am a terrible, self-taught, typist. But the word processor has a spell checker and the corrections are invisible - the reader cannot tell where mistakes once were. Similarly, cutting and pasting a paragraph to change the sequence of an argument leaves physical traces when performed on paper with scissors and paste. The electronic version leaves no traces. The physical quality of the finished text has greatly increased, it looks neat and is, in principle at least, easier to read. Yet one drawback that some people find with this, is that texts are endlessly revisable and so the temptation proves irresistible to tinker and to continue polishing the text, whereas had it been hand-written or typed, the sheer physical labour involved in making a new draft would have been such as to effect an ending of the work. The revisability and polished final appearance are the least of the advantages but serve as a good starting point. Files saved on disc occupy very little space and may be easily copied for very little expense. It is far easier and cheaper to put a floppy disc in the post than a 400 page |
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| than having to type Lévi-Strauss every time you can simply type LS then at
the end do a global search/replace to change all the occurrences of the 'word' LS to Lévi-Strauss. In order for this to work you must be careful that your shorthand abbreviations do not occur anywhere else, and be careful to restrict the changes to whole words only. I use anthy for anthropology, anths for anthropologists, em for ethnomethodology, bkkb for b`ø kúkú b`ø and so on. The shorthand need not be just for words but phrases as well, as in the last example (which is the Mambila languages expression for the Elders). If there is a conflict where the same set of letters occurs in two different contexts only one of which you want to change then one solution is to make a temporary change which isolates just one of the two words from the other which can then be safely changed. Let me illustrate this with an example dealing not with words exactly but with line ends - the problem is the same, and its solution illustrates the general strategy to use. When exchanging files with colleagues, and when copying text from online sources, a common irritation is that a carriage return or line break has been placed at the end of each line so the automatic creation of lines by your word processor does not work correctly. In such texts there are typically line breaks at the end of each line, and two at the end of each paragraph. The problem is that if one simply changes every line break to a space then the paragraph breaks which you want to retain are lost along with the line breaks which you want to remove. The answer is first to replace every occurrence of two successive line breaks (identifying paragraphs) with a code which occurs nowhere else in the text (I often use 'q1q' as a safe string of charactors which do not occur anywhere else). Having completed this for the whole text, single line breaks (which will have been unaffected by the previous operation) can be changed to spaces. Finally, the temporary string 'q1q' can be replaced with a single line break. The result is a text which uses line breaks only at the end of paragraphs. Exactly the same technique can be used to change other cases where the sequence of letters one wishes to replace occurs in other contexts as well. Odd, 'unnatural' strings can also be used as place markers since they can be located easily by using the 'search' facility. Many word processors have a way of marking particular text as being 'non-printing' so that although visible on the screen these 'place marks' will not occur in any printout you make. Non-printing text also allows you to insert notes to yourself about the text on the model of jottings or marginal notes - which you will either incorporate into the main body of the text or delete at some future occasion. By making them non-printing you are saved from the embarrassment of having your working notes distributed on paper. If you use this |
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| technique you do, however, need to be careful before distributing electronic copies
which include non-printing text, but once again the search/replace facility can make life easy - in most word processors it is possible to search for any text with a particular formatting characteristic. This is intended to allow you to change all the underlines to italics (sometimes a useful operation) but also you can use it to search for all text formatted as non-printing and replace it with nothing, thus deleting it. The final under-used aspect of at least some word processors that I will discuss here is their indexing capabilities. As has already been discussed indexes are important, useful and hard to generate automatically, because the same topic can be discussed using different words and phrases. An indexing capabilities provide some assistance, to the task that has to be undertaken by a person to create an index. Markers are placed round words in the text which are to be indexed. If a synonym for a term in the index has been used then it can be typed in (formatted as non-printing text so the sense and the pagination is unchanged). This allows you to generate a set of global change/replace operations which will, for example, mark all the occurrences of specified proper names as being index entries, and as you identify synonyms a word can be replaced by itself (so the printed text is unchanged) followed by a non-printing and indexed synonym. This can be a helpful exercise to undertake in order to manage large texts whether or not you are actually attempting to produce an index to a printed work. In the latter case there is an additional problem of ensuring that the page breaks on the screen occur in exactly the same place as on the printed page. The safest way of doing this is the following. First, choose the largest printing paper that is available to you in the 'page or printing set-up' option. There may be a custom setting allowing you to tell it that you are printing on A3 paper, for example. What we must avoid is the word processor inserting page breaks where none actually occur on the printed page. By also telling it to print at a very small size (10 points or less) then you can be confident that the page breaks automatically inserted by the computer will be less common than the actual page breaks on the proofs. There now follows the chore of inserting page breaks by |
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| advantages | disadvantages |
| easy and cheap to make copies | long-term durability - uncertain |
| -lightweight discs |
| distribute copies - safety | stealability of equipment |
| solar panels and ordinary batteries | dependency on equipment and electricity |
| paper for notes, electronic index and typed up reflections |
lure of technology - anthropologists hiding beyond the keyboard - distracting BOTH the anthropologist and the informants |
| I should confess that I persist in writing my primary fieldnotes on paper but use
a computer in the field to index and abstract from the notes as the research progresses. |
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