“Keeping a notebook:
Lab bibliotherapy;
Data, procedure in
Tome here are stored.
Calcs and reagents and
Instrumentation:
The table of contents,
Their order records.”
The 2 November 2020 Twitter poem described one of the most ubiquitous tasks that a chemistry student or chemist completes: keeping a lab notebook.
“Keeping a notebook: /
Lab bibliotherapy; /
Data, procedure in /
Tome here are stored…”
In the interdisciplinary seminar I’ve described previously, we discuss types of disciplinary documentation. We read Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” and examine similarities and differences between her observational record and the lab notebooks that many of the science students are assigned.
One observation that arises quickly is the audience of a writer’s notebook versus a chemist’s notebook. Didion writes daily observations in contemplating her own life: “[T]he point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking… Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”
In contrast, students are often familiar with my general exhortation: “Make sure your notebook is detailed enough that another chemist could pick it up and repeat your experiment!” STEM lab notebooks follow systematic formats; “data [and] procedure” must be carefully recorded, using notation that other scientists understand.
“Calcs and reagents and /
Instrumentation: /
The table of contents, /
Their order records.”
Other required notebook elements include materials (reagents) used in an experiment, sample calculations, and specific instrumental details; as an academic term proceeds, a running table of contents is updated.
The image on this website’s homepage is a photograph of pages from my great-grandfather’s now-century-old lab notebook. (Someday soon, that notebook deserves an essay of its own; the phrase “keeping a notebook,” of course, has multiple resonances.) Noting the theme of this poem, specifically, I demonstrate how consistent these main goals have been for students and scientists across the years, using the historical document as a reference in the course.
Chemphasis 