Writing, Writing, Writing: The Natural History Field Journal As Literary Text and Social Tool

Writing, Writing, Writing: The Natural History Field Journal As Literary Text and Social Tool

Faculty Mentor(s)
Cathryn Carson (History)
Student Apprentice(s)
Melissa Preston

Field notes were the glue that held together one of the most ambitious programs in the narrative of North American natural history. This was Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, created in 1908 under the direction of the young ornithologist Joseph Grinnell. Grinnell articulated a vision of the museum as a literary repository, a memory tool for the future. Attuned to language, Grinnell was always “writing, writing, writing,” one of his students recalled, obsessed by field notes and other graphic forms. Out of his own diarizing experience he originated and propagated the “Grinnellian method” that is considered the origin of scientific field note practice today.

The apprentice, Melissa Preston, sampled field notes for close reading for genre conventions, stylistic devices, and other aspects of literary form. From this sample the student built a picture of the museum’s social structure. Drawing on textual perceptions of stylistic affinities, she contributed to the understanding of the field journals as a social tool. By the end of the summer the student drafted a paper on the field notes as literary texts.