A reflection on the workshop Sharing Field Notes

On Monday May 26^th, our colleague Anna Roodhof (PhD Candidate at Rural Sociology) attended a workshop on sharing field notes, which was organized by Leiden University, DANS-KNAW (Data Archiving and Networked Services), ISS (the Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University), and PNN (the Netherlands’ PhD Candidates Network). This workshop was organized to discuss qualitative data – field notes in particular – in the context of open science, specifically the FAIR and CARE principles.

Field notes are a type of data collection that is very common at the Rural Sociology Group and elsewhere: they are prevalent in many disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, sociology, archeology, ethnobotany, and ecology. These notes are often textual, but can include visual components such as sketches or photos. They can be written for a variety of reasons: to provide context, to serve as primary data, or to explicate the researcher’s positionality in the field. While it is uncommon for this type of data to be published in full, it can be done.

One of the guest speakers, medical anthropologist Janneke Verheijen shared how she published all of her field notes from her PhD research project from her ethnographic field work in Malawi. She resided for a full year in a small community to study the prevalence of HIV in this community. As this was a very time intensive endeavor, and was also quite invasive for the research participants, she deemed it important to publish her field notes so other researchers could utilize these for future research without needing to commit to such extensive field work themselves. Due to the sensitive nature of the research, she pseudonymized the entire data set.

This example highlights some of the key reasons for sharing field notes. For example, during field work, researchers often generate much more data than they are able to use in their own publications. Sharing data can prevent data going to waste. It also offers a degree of transparency in the data analysis process – readers can trace back claims and conclusions to the observations on which they are based.

However, sharing field notes is not without challenges. Field notes are often written for personal use, and therefore they often need to be digitalized and edited to make them accessible and acceptable for reuse. Repositories often require meta-data to accommodate the re-examination of relevant data. This requires considerable effort on the part of the researcher – effort that often goes unrecognized and comes on top of researchers’ already sizeable workload. On top of that, field notes can contain sensitive and personal data. In niche research populations, pseudonymizations might not be possible at all. Obtaining informed consent to publish these can pose both ethical and legal issues, especially when the involved participants are unfamiliar with the scope and workings of academic archiving repositories.

These challenges often manifest in trade-offs for researchers which boil down to the question of how helpful it actually is (and for whom) to share field notes. A common route is to publish field notes under restricted access, which grants researchers some control over who gets to access the data. Again, meta-data is key for transparency, as researchers need to know whether it would be worthwhile to contact authors about this data. Moreover, depending on who benefits the most from data being shared, sharing the burden of effort to do so might be appropriate.

In light of making qualitative research more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, (FAIR), it is vital to consider data sharing when conducting field work. Considering the FAIR principles early on can reduce the amount of editing and organizing needed later on. Nevertheless, given the personal and often sensitive nature of the data, it remains essential to question whether it is helpful to share the data, and whether it has the potential of inflicting any harm onto both the research participants and the researchers involved.  

This workshop was part of a workshop series funded through an NWO call for the Social Sciences & Humanities Thematic Digital Competence Centers. The workshops serve as input for a handbook on this topic, which will be published in 2026.