-you must want to do fieldwork, and you must keep your eyes open

-fieldwork is just sightseeing unless you can use the information later

-no matter how detailed your observations are, they are of little value in geography if you cannot link them to a location

-this is where maps come in handy in the field

-making notes about a site at its location on a good map lends precision to your fieldwork

-increasingly, you can note your location accurately by using GPS
-Global Positioning System receivers are lightweight and portable

-they are also becoming quite accurate

-better models can even record and store data for sample locations; you can later download that data directly into a GIS

-fieldwork is literally data collection, whether it is soil or plant types or religious patterns, so consistency is important for accurate results

• remember, fieldwork is data collection

• your observations are thus raw data

• if you have observed things systematically and recorded these observations consistently, your analysis of the data will go smoothly

• you will also be able to do something with your data
  -most basic is mapping similar observations

  -then, interpret and explain the pattern

  -finally, compare the pattern to other patterns

• one of these was common at the University of Chicago
  -in this view, geographers studied a particular problem in depth and then went into the field to look for answers to the problem

  -this involved the deductive method

  -this method can obviously work, but it is very easy to go into the field and simply look until you find what you are looking for

• another view was held by Carl Sauer at the University of California, Berkeley
  -Sauer was probably the strongest advocate of fieldwork in American geography
  -he made all of his students to fieldwork, mainly in Mexico and South America

  -he himself conducted fieldwork almost every year of his professional life

  -he reputedly once said that any mode of transportation faster than a mule was too fast for fieldwork, and he preferred walking

  -Sauer's fieldwork philosophy was just the opposite of the Chicago view
  -Sauer felt geographers should identify vague topics

  -they should then conduct thorough, unbiased fieldwork and simply see what problems and answers the landscape yielded

  -this involved the inductive method
  -more sound logically and scientifically, in many ways

  -the upshot if this was that Sauer send his students into the field with little more than a notebook
  -students were not told how to do fieldwork, for everyone does it differently

  -they were certainly not told what to look for

  -it was really on the job training

• Doolittle is a widely respected fieldworker in his own right
  -he has spent many a field season researching pre-Columbian agricultural technology in the Sonoran Desert of northwestern Mexico

• the materials he has compiled on the Web are for a upper-level undergraduate field techniques course he teaches
  -they include step-by-step instructions on a wide range of techniques and skills

  -they also include a series of exercises on each of the major topics related to fieldwork

  -there is also a superb reading list attached to this site

• if you anticipate gathering first-hand data in the field at some point in your career, this Web site is well worth spending some time examining

• it is (or should be) the truly fun and exciting part of geography

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