It means you can't find some material and you forget stuff,
you lose stuff and so on.
So you have to organize stuff properly and in fieldwork,
you have to deal with people, so you have to organize your fieldwork properly.
So where do you have to think of?
What kinds of things?
Well, the first thing is hanging out.
Hanging out takes time.
Anthropologists would call it deep hanging out, which means that
you stay with people for long period of time and you hang out with them.
You do things with them, you go shopping with them and
it's terribly boring sometimes.
But being bored doesn't mean you are not doing research, because you're doing
research, but you have to plan it, you have to plan time for hanging out.
It takes days and days on end in order to understand some tiny
bits of a specific cultural situation.
So plan this time.
Plan also your appointments.
Making appointments and keeping appointments, especially the various,
obviously is important.
Many informants do not keep appointments, but you have to as a researcher and
prepare your data collection before and.
Think about what am I going to ask these people?
Where am I going to focus on?
And during fearing fieldwork, during the research, review your data collection.
Just sit back for a few minutes or a few hours and then reflect,
what am I doing here?
Is this correct?
Is this focus okay?
Or am I creating some sort of tunnel vision?
Or am I only confirming my own biases?
So you have to take time for this and plan this time and
then this is important, plan your writing time.
I tend that in my field work in Sri Lanka, I tend not to go to festivals,
which was really interesting and really nice and
they took many hours until deep at night and I watch them and watch them and
watch them and then I come back the next day and there is something else to watch.
So, I forgot to write down my material and it's really bad.
So take time, plan writing time to write full field notes.
Plan time in order to transcribe your material.
Plan time to reflect and to write down these memos.
Not just sit and ponder, but also write them down.
I'm preaching a bit, but it's necessary, because you have to organize your data.
There are quite some people who start out like this.
They have an empty box and in this empty box, they throw in their material.
It might be documents, it might be full field notes, it might be transcripts.
And they just throw it in, because back home, they will start organizing it.
And this is a physical box, but you can also think of a folder on a computer.
You just throw it in a folder and then fill it up and then if it's full,
you will make new folders or you'll make new boxes and
you'll fill them up again and then again and again and again.
And this is what happened with quite some students, but also colleagues.
They came back from field work doing autographic field works and their room was
full of material and all of the material, all the data is inside those boxes,
but those boxes were complete messes inside and that's terrible.
It's sloppy science.