Every piece of fieldwork involves, in principle, countless administrative acts and procedures. These are preceded by the instruction which, in functional terms, can be attributed to two different levels. One consists of providing a methodology for the acquisition of knowledge; the other consists of the bureaucracy, or the organizational framework, within which the fieldwork takes place. Whilst on the one hand the investigator is striving for an optimization of the acquisition of knowledge, on the other hand the process of checking, both the active subject and the object of the investigation, is a concomitant feature of both aspects. The formulation of regulations and obligations, both during travel and in the field, corresponds to the requirement for unconditional documentation, however it is constituted. If one understands writing up and recording as knowledge-creating procedures that participate directly in the creation of scientific objects, then these records mark the threshold between the intellectual, the observed and the material conceptualization on paper. What is of particular interest is how, within this creative process of authorship, in addition to the subjective gestures of writing and provisional drafting, general routines are simultaneously adjusted that may be understood as strategies of objectiveness (in the sense of Daston’s “mechanical objectivity”), which are more or less independent of the subject. For routines of this sort were cultivated, and corresponded to disciplinary standardization. Whatever the case, the organization of the material in different systems of notation, in lists, according to different formal viewpoints in protocols, reports, diaries and journals (the “Little Tools of Knowledge”) does not happen by chance, since every format that may be selected is also part of an agreement that is shared in the praxis by the community.

Using a variety of selected handwritten materials that were produced during fieldwork in the context of the geological mapping project (1848-1867) of the Habsburg Monarchy, commissioned by the Royal Imperial Geological Survey in Vienna, I should like to address this way between subjective observation and written documentation, the conceptualization of experience and the strategies of writing, and also the procedures for standardization. Through this, fieldwork becomes a procedure that is materialized on paper.