What is the equivalent of the laboratory notebook in the humanities?

Question

As a scientist, the idea of a "research notebook," or its functional equivalent, has been well ingrained into me. However, it's not clear to me if this is a universal phenomenon, or if it's limited to the sciences.

For students working in the humanities and other fields—such as literature, economics, or philosophy—what is the working equivalent of the laboratory notebook? If not, what is the preferred method of keeping records in those fields?

Answer 1

I asked my wife, which works in art history/egyptology. So first, "it depends of how the person works" ;).

However, it seems that many people are making a large number of thematic reading synthesis, research notes (as we do) and she also pointed out the importance of her personal database, where she stores archaeological artefacts, their descriptions, the related bibliography, personal notes about them, their relations, etc. According to her, this is THE most important thing for her work.

Answer 2

From my impression, the nearest equivalent would be an academics' text source repository. This could be a library of theoretical works personally owned (and almost certainly monographic rather than papers). It could be a set of commonly referenced canon texts spread across four or five libraries in their region that they consult. It could be the items above plus documentary series such as archives, cultural texts.

The objects manipulated, day to day, in conducting humanities research are texts; whether these are straight texts, or the meanings developed from physical records, or the meanings developed reflecting on terse problem statements.

In my experience, some scholars keep detailed notes, and others don't. I try and keep my notes and sources in a deep text searchable database with what meta-data I can cheaply acquire. There is no standard for keeping a repository, and the way in which a scholar learns to keep an adequate repository is idiosyncratic.

There isn't a disciplinary standard for keeping a repository, above and beyond "study skills" type courses which aren't mandatory or systematised. To evidence of the adequacy of the "experiment" equivalent scholars demonstrate their mastery over the relevant texts by providing evidence of firmly supportable readings through citation and footnoting, or by quality argument.