My grandpa's old field notes made me question everything about dig documentation

I was cleaning out his garage last weekend and found his notebook from a 1982 site in New Mexico. The guy wrote down every single rock layer shift and even sketched tool marks by hand. My professor keeps pushing us to use these fancy tablet apps, but that notebook had way more detail than any of my digital logs from this semester. Makes me wonder if we're losing something by typing everything out instead of drawing it old school. Anyone else ever compare old hand-written field notes to modern digital records and notice a difference?

3 comments

3 Comments

amy15422d ago

The physical ACT of drawing forces you to notice details that typing just skims over. Digital's convenient but it cheats your brain out of that deep observation time.

kelly.nora22d ago

So does that mean digital is just making us lazy or is it training a different part of the brain? @amy154 I think you're onto something about the physical act, but maybe the real loss is the forced slowness. When you draw by hand you have to sit with the subject and actually look at it, not just snap a photo and trace later. My sketches are full of mistakes and eraser marks, but those are the parts I remember best.

terryf6210d ago

Full of mistakes and eraser marks" is exactly what makes it stick, same here.