I initially thought of using Instagram or Tumbler for images but I didn’t want to have to use yet another app and am not sure I want to write live fieldnotes in the way Tricia Wang does. Evernote can store multimedia files as attachments to notes (e.g.Here are some of the pros that helped sway me to try it out: Here’s what my template currently looks like:Įvernote has its pros and cons, of course.

So I’ve transferred my template to Evernote and am in the process of trialling it as I begin the research process. Taking a slightly different approach, Tim Sensing uses Evernote for a student ethnography assignment, something also suggested on a web page I found for the course Web 2.0 Foundations: A Networked Research Course describing how to take fieldnotes and write them up in Evernote. Over on the Wenner-Gren Blog, Danielle Carr discusses how she became a “reluctant convert” to Evernote and outlines some advantages and disadvantages of using it. A quick Google search led me to a couple of useful blog posts by reseachers who use Evernote this way, including one by David Keyes on Evernote as Field Notebook where he talks about how he came to use Evernote for fieldwork and data analysis. I asked ethnographic researchers on Twitter to share what they used to take electronic fieldnotes, and Kelly Dombroski was the first to suggest I take a look at the possibilities Evernote provides for writing and organising fieldnotes. I have used Evernote for a while (mainly for storing annotations and web clippings) but I have to admit it wasn’t the first thing that sprang to my mind when I thought of switching away from MS Word for fieldnotes. Now that I’m starting some new projects it’s the perfect time to try Evernote for ethnographic fieldnotes. A while ago I wrote about the fieldnote template I used in MS Word for my PhD research.

Evernote templates 2015