Field Notes on Field Notes: Informing Technology Support for Biologists

Abstract

ABSTRACT Biology fieldwork generates a wealth of qualitative and quantitative information, an unstructured 'bag of data,' requiring substantial labor to coordinate and distill. In the interest of furthering research, we present findings from interviews with 15 biologists and analyses of 13 notebooks. We learned that biologists rely on their notebooks as the primary record of observations, plans, measurements, and results. However, a gap exists between the field tools used to collect data and the laboratory tools used to analyze that data. Our goal is to bridge this gap, bringing the field to the laboratory and the laboratory to the field. We introduce ideas to augment notebooks with two related goals: presenting notes alongside contextual information and using the notebook itself as a query interface.