At a colloquial meeting Tue, 3 Dec 2019, of Leo, Florian, Robin, and Markus in St. Pauli, we shared some experiences about process documentation in and outside of science. We decided to make a small list how this can look like, just giving examples and how it worked for us. Please add below with your names indicated:

On my agenda for that day (2.12.2019) I had a couple of points. The first one on the list appeared to me like a 'quick-to-solve' problem. I wanted to cut a long video in strips of equal length. That was my task and it was already part of the process that I decided to use python to tackle the task. Of course it turned out monstrous and took me 5 hours rather than half an hour. Before I embarked on this agenda point and thus before I knew about the time it would take me to reach a satisfactory outcome (of course I only knew after I reached it), I decided to track my steps and some of my thoughts as I went along. I tracked this process by means of an itemized list on an open office document. Eventually I filled 10 pages with 39 items. Here it is: pythonissues.odt — Leo 2019/12/05 15:27

How do creative processes differ? How are they similar? I document the process of sewing a shirt, using the python program I had written earlier. I choose a video recording, because I'm quite busy sewing the collar otherwise. What are the pertinent questions one may ask about the process? Here is the video documentation:

— Leo 2019/12/05 15:30

by Florian

As kind of preparation for the BRCP meeting, inspired by discussions with Mona and Tim and Marcel (from Xenorama), I tried to do a first step in the direction of “dealing with the research process”, which was the topic of my session at the meeting. I went throught my “lab book” and noticed that I had put impressively diverse types of information in there: mathematical derivations, thoughts, sketches, feelings. So I was asking myself the question, what is actually the process and how can I find that out? What tools are there to “observe” the process? Well, without falling too much into theoretic thoughts, I started to do a collage from the pages of my book that I commented from my actual perspective. It was a really fun experience that not only put this process in a very different light but also lead so come new ideas inspired by what I thought then. When I was in this process, I actually had a completely different feeling towards it. I never knew if this will lead somewhere and this kind of feeling lost was sometimes not easy to stand. And I think one can learn a lot for future processes here: this uncertainty must be there and it is very helpful to learn accepting it and maybe even appreciating it!

Here is the collage:
diary-process.pdf