Notescribing, or The Problem of Accuracy

When I take notes in class, they tend to become rather extensive. If the professor turns out to be particularly engaging, I may end up with three or four pages of arrows connecting a multitude of disjointed phrases. I will admit though that I compose most of my notes verbatim, or at least recording the precise phrasing used by the instructor.

I continue to wonder now whether or not documenting lectures in this way imitates some sort of plagiarism, or bluntly is a pen-and-paper piracy. I don’t open and close my lecture notes with quotation marks, nor have I ever written the date, time, and name of the presenter as an excuse for a citation.

Recently, when I have attended lectures relevant to the content on my blog, I’ve lugged my laptop to the event and furiously banged out notes via keyboard. In the past few posts, I’ve simply copy and pasted the sketchy outlines directly from my text editor, sans paraphrasing or formatting. However, I doubt many, if not all, members of my audience cannot extract even a basic meaning from these digital (fingers, not technology) excreta. They’re in my own note-taking language, so I don’t blame anyone.

But how do I reformat the notes and then publish them? As I mentioned before, most of the notes I take are fairly verbatim from the presentation. If I translate from notes to prose, and I feel the need to write in a style that includes the first person (“I”), does such a strategy not only plagiarize but also possibly infer misquotations? I decided to call the results of my note-taking methods “notescriptions,” a bastardization of “note” and “transcription” (the latter used because I am sooo close to transcribing word-for-word). So, from a journalistic perspective, I can only hope that no reader will attack me for transcribing, paraphrasing, or simply “notescribing.” I do not intend to misquote in the least. Yet if a reader considers my published notes an attempt at literal faithfulness, then I’ll certainly feel the blow. I recently finished listening to a podcast from MIT’s Communications Forum of a lecture entitled The Emergence of Citizens’ Media, in which one speaker, commenting on the aspiration of newspapers to remain ahead of digital journalism, stated that print journalism must strive not for the truth, but for accuracy. Certainly, as a blogger (read: journalist), I must endeavor for precision. But I’m not recording audio. I’m not video taping. I publish my notes so that people can gain a better sense of the event I attended, the lecture that I sat in on, the generalities of the debate that I am trying to discuss in any of my blogged articles.

My point in direct terms:
I will publish my notes (or, “notescriptions”). They will contain a significant amount of verbatim language. Please do not view the notes as complete and literal transcriptions, nor quote from them as such. Please do regard them as comprehensive (though not perfect) window into a lecture (or any other event) you may have not attended.