The Art of Field Journaling

Next week we will host our first on-site class at Rauner Special Collections Library since March of 2020. As you can imagine, we are so excited to have students back in our space exploring our collections in an up close and personal sort of way. The class is on Social Ecological Systems and is taught by Flora Krivak-Tetley from the Environmental Studies Program. Why are they coming to Rauner, you might be wondering? Well, the students will be designing and creating their own specialized field journals next week and we happen to have a wide variety of scientific journals, diaries, albums, log books, and other ways of recording data. We hope that, as the students examine these documents, they'll find inspiration and insight when it comes time to shape their own particular means of recording observations and discoveries.

One of the journals that we will show the students is a diary created by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Stefansson was a Canadian explorer born to Icelandic immigrants in 1879. After numerous Arctic expeditions, he became a renowned lecturer and advocate for the Arctic. Stefansson was a lecturer at Dartmouth from 1947 until his death in 1962. This volume is one of his field journals from the Stefansson-Anderson Expedition (1908-1912), which includes his anthropological observations of Inuit people (which he and others called the “Kogmallick” during this period of exploration). Of particular interest are Stefansson’s drawings of Inuit tattoos and his attempts to interpret their meaning.

To see Stefansson's diary, come to Rauner and ask for MSS-98, Box 3.