Week 6 Bench: Field week

Until now you have been reading other people’s records. From this week the corpus is yours, and so is everything that goes wrong with it.

The protocol#

1. Photograph the artefact straight on. An angled photograph of a sign is a photograph of a wall.
2. Capture the context in a second frame. A menu item means something different on a menu than it does cropped.
3. Write the date at the scene. Not that evening. The number of specimens in any corpus that are dated to the day someone got home is embarrassing.
4. Record the place at the granularity you would publish. A suburb and a month is a provenance. A street address is somebody’s workplace.
5. Do not photograph the people under the sign. If they are in frame and incidental, crop before the file is named.
6. Ask, inside. Shop interiors and menus are private property, and the answer is usually yes if the question is asked.

Before you leave#

Say the six steps out loud to the person next to you. The ones you cannot remember are the ones you will skip on a wet afternoon in a car park.

Afterwards#

The break follows this week. Bring back four specimens, and at least one of them should be something you would previously have walked past.