I was hired by the New Deal organisation the Farm Security Administration to make pictures to show the citizens of the country and the congress how desperate the conditions were for many people in the areas of the country. And each week I had to produce an expense account for the US government and I also had to have captions for all the pictures I made, and so I began to scribble down little things to myself when I was working in the field, and at night while my film was being developed in the bathroom of my hotel I would then write notes to myself from the notes I'd written during the day as I was making pictures.

 

In time I expanded these notes and over the years I expanded them even fuller, even more fully, and you know the keeping of notes begins as a necessity and expanding them often becomes a habit, and then somewhere along the line for notebook takers it becomes a compulsion. And somewhere in my years of making pictures and scribbling notes, scribbling notes to myself became a compulsion, and it's been so ever since.

Carl Mydans (1998)

 

Thought of publishing my photographs in an album with explanatory notes.
(Bronislaw Malinowski, cited in Young 1998: 1)

 

It is common to hear people talk about 'writing up' research. Implicit in the phrase is the sense that writing is a stage that occurs principally when the research has finished and is a straightforward process of telling what was done and what conclusions can be drawn. However, the process of research involves many forms of writing, from letter writing and minute taking to academic papers and formal research reports. The aim of this paper is to consider one form of research writing that has received relatively little attention, yet which is central to the research process, especially, but not exclusively, for those conducting qualitative or action research studies - the research diary.

 

The research diary is distinct from report or academic paper writing in at least two ways. First, it does not attempt to present the process of research in the linear fashion that is typical of research paper writing, what Kaplan calls "the reconstructed logic of science". (Kaplan cited in Marshall & Rossman 1995: 15). Instead it should capture something of "the real inner drama" of research "with its intuitive base, its halting time-line, and its extensive recycling of concepts and perspectives" (Bargar & Duncan cited in Marshall & Rossman 1995: 15) an aspect often hidden from view in the final published accounts. Second, its purpose is not primarily about the communication of the research to others. The reason for keeping a research diary is to facilitate the research process through recording observations, thoughts and questions as they happen, for later use by the researcher, and to stimulate reflective thinking about the research.

 

As indicated in the quotations at the top of this page, it is also the aim of this paper to consider the research diary in relation to visual research, whether this is the use of the diary as a means of reflecting on the visual domain or the inclusion of a visual component in the diary itself.

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