22
Field notes app felt silly until I used it on a real dig in Ohio
I used to scribble everything on paper, then transcribe it later, and lost half the details in between. Last month I tried a notes app with photo tags at a site near Dayton, and I found a rim shard I'd forgotten about within minutes. Anyone else make the switch from paper to digital, or am I the odd one out?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
jasonallen29d ago
Read a paper in the Midwest Archaeological Conference last year about how people lose up to 40 percent of their field notes when they wait to type them up. That number stuck with me because I always blamed my bad handwriting. So I switched to a simple app on my phone that lets me snap a photo and type a quick line right there in the trench. Found a tiny piece of decorated pottery last September that would have been a total mystery if I hadn't tagged it with the depth and grid coordinates on the spot. The photo also caught the soil color change, which I never would have written down. Now I only carry paper for sketching profiles, everything else goes straight to digital.
1