taking in sociological investigation

Once I was started on the career of a social investigator,the manuscript books became a record of other people’scharacter and conversation; of their gestures and acts; infact, of human behaviour; and, as such, these entries havean interest of their own.

The industrious apprentice will find in the Appendix (C) a short memorandumon the method of analytic note-taking, which we have found most convenient inthe use of documents and contemporaneous literature, as well as in the recording ofinterviews and personal observations.

And whilst I could plan out an admirable system ofnote-taking, the actual execution of the plan was, owing toan inveterate tendency to paraphrase extracts which I in¬tended to copy, not to mention an irredeemably illegible hand¬writing, a wearisome irritation to me.

in a later chapter I call it syntheticnote-taking, in order to distinguish it from the analytic note¬taking upon which historical work is based.

CHAPTER ICHARACTER AND CIRCUMSTANCEIn the following pages I describe the craft of a social in¬vestigator as I have practised it. I give some account of myearly and crude observation and clumsy attempts at reason¬ing, and then of the more elaborated technique of note¬taking, of listening to and recording the spoken word and ofobserving and even experimenting in the life of existinginstitutions.

Struggling with the Co-op. News and enduring all the miseries ofwant of training in methods of work [I write some weeks later].Midway I discover that my notes are slovenly, and under wrong head¬ings, and I have to go through some ten weeks’ work again! Up at6.30 and working 5 hours a day, sometimes 6. Weary but not dis¬couraged. [MS. diary, July 26, 1889.]

It wasnot until we had completely re-sorted all our innumerable sheets ofpaper according to subjects, thus bringing together all the facts relatingto each, whatever the trade concerned, or the place or the date—andhad shuffled and reshuffled these sheets according to various tentativehypotheses—that a clear, comprehensive and verifiable theory of theworking and results of Trade Unionism emerged in our minds; tobe embodied, after further researches by way of verification, in ourIndustrial Democracy (1897).

On many occasions we have been com¬pelled to break off the writing of a particular chapter, or even of aparticular paragraph, in order to test, by reshuffling the whole of ournotes dealing with a particular subject, a particular place, a particularorganisation or a particular date, the relative validity of hypotheses asto cause and effect. I may remark, parenthetically, that we have foundthis “ game with reality ”, this building up of one hypothesis andknocking it down in favour of others that had been revealed or verifiedby a new shuffle of the notes—especially when we severally “ backed ”rival hypotheses—a most stimulating recreation! In that way alonehave we been able “ to put our bias out of gear ”, and to make ourorder of thought correspond, not with our own prepossessions, butwith the order of things discovered by our investigations.

The centre of the sheet will be occupied by the text of the note, that is,the main statement or description of the fact recorded, whether it bea personal observation of your own, an extract from a document, aquotation from some literary source, an answer given in evidence, or astatistical calculation or table of figures.

THE ART OF NOTE-TAKING

the making of notes, or whatthe French call “ fiches ’O

; until, in 1907, eachclass had come to be dealt with according to principles which wereobviously very different from those of 1834. The report of this investi¬gation was presented to the Poor Law Commission, with the interest¬ing result that we heard no more of the “ principles of 1834 ”! It wassubsequently published as English Poor Law Policy (1910).

An instance may be given of the necessity of the “ separate sheet ” system.Among the many sources of information from which we constructed our bookThe Manor and the Borough were the hundreds of reports on particular boroughsmade by the Municipal Corporation Commissioners in 1835 .These four hugevolumes are well arranged and very fully indexed; they were in our own possession;we had read them through more than once; and we had repeatedly consulted themon particular points. We had, in fact, used them as if they had been our own boundnotebooks, thinking that this would suffice. But, in the end, we found ourselvesquite unable to digest and utilise this material until we had written out every oneof the innumerable facts on a separate sheet of paper, so as to allow of the mechanicalabsorption of these sheets among our other notes; of their complete assortment bysubjects; and of their being shuffled and reshuffled to test hypotheses as to suggestedco-existences and sequences.

By the method of note-taking that I have described, it was practicableto sort out all our thousands of separate pieces of paper according toany, or successively according to all, of these categories or combinationof categories

What is the use of this pedantic method of note-taking, involvingmasses of paper and a lot of hard thinking, not to mention the shufflingand reshuffling, which is apparently the final cause of this intolerableelaboration? will be asked by the post-graduate student eager to pub¬lish an epoch-making treatise on the History of Government, or, per¬chance, on the History of Freedom, within the two years he has allottedto the taking of his doctorate. The only answer I can give is to citeour own experience.

final cause

recipe for scientific note-taking

For a highly elaborated and skilled processof “ making notes ”, besides its obvious use in recording observationswhich would otherwise be forgotten, is actually an instrument of dis¬covery.

This process serves a similar purpose in sociology to that of theblow-pipe and the balance in chemistry, or the prism and the electro¬scope in physics. That is to say, it enables the scientific worker to breakup his subject-matter, so as to isolate and examine at his leisure itsvarious component parts, and to recombine them in new and experi¬mental groupings in order to discover which sequences of events have acausal significance

If what is in question ”, states the most learned German methodologist, “ isa many-sided subject, such as a history of a people or a great organisation, theseveral sheets of notes must be so arranged that for each aspect of the subject thematerial can be surveyed as a whole. With any considerable work the notes mustbe taken upon separate loose sheets, which can easily be arranged in different orders,and among which sheets with new dates can be interpolated without difficulty ”(Lehrbuch der historischen Metkode, by Bernheim, 1908, p. 555).

“ Every one agrees nowadays ”, observethe most noted French writers on the study of history, “ that it is advisable to collectmaterials on separate cards or slips of paper. . . . The advantages of this artifice areobvious; the detachability of the slips enables us to group them at will in a host ofdifferent combinations; if necessary, to change their places; it is easy to bring textsof the same kind together, and to incorporate additions, as they are acquired, in theinterior of the groups to which they belong ” (Introduction to the Study of History,by Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos, translated by C. G. Berry, 1898, p.103). “