Welcome to the Autumn Society Codex, home to the Anansi system of Field Notes. Anansi is named for an African trickster god of storytelling, often symbolized as a spider. The Anansi system combines two foundational systems: the Grinnell Field Notes system and the Commonplace book, to create a method for developing attention and retaining details while integrating that knowledge. Each of the elements has been widely proven, within its own arena, as well as through diverse studies of individual aspects of the system, across several fields.
Grinnell
Joseph Grinnell was a white American naturalist whose field documentation methods became standard scientific practice. The Autumn Society teaches his system not because it’s perfect, but because it works—and because understanding how scientists organize sustained observation gives you tools to document what matters to you. Grinnell’s methods aren’t the destination. They’re the foundation for the Anansi system, which adapts scientific rigor for writers investigating culture, history, and place. You need to understand how Grinnell works before you can see how Anansi transforms it for our purposes.
The Species Account as Commonplace Book
Grinnell’s species account functions as a specialized commonplace book. While traditional commonplace books collect quotes, anecdotes, and wisdom under thematic headings, the species account collects all observations of a single subject—a bird species, a plant, a location—across time. Both systems solve the same problem: how do you make accumulated observations actually useful instead of letting them sit inert in chronological journals?
The Anansi system, our take on Grinnell, integrates the species account structure back into a full commonplace book. We add a Q log and a Ledger to the commonplace, to capture the evolution of thought and relate it to the time spent on our projects. Because we are not collecting physical specimens, the Species Account is referred to as the Catalog, and consists of survey and conservation nodes inspired by the Massachusetts Historical Commission Form Bs.
Connections
Commonplace books have a 2000-year history as tools for managing knowledge. Renaissance scholars used them to cope with information overload after the printing press. Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know documents how they complained about book abundance using language identical to our modern anxieties. The Anansi system puts you in that tradition while adapting it for contemporary investigative writing. You’re not just keeping a journal. You’re building a knowledge base that compounds over time. You’re learning at the speed of human understanding.
Anansi is taught across two sections:
- Grinnell Field Notes — The standard for scientific field documentation. Practicing Grinnell Field Notes develops attention and retention of details.
- Commonplace Books — Historical knowledge management practice for writers and researchers, Commonplace books were required for academic studies through the Renaissance. Widely known commonplaces include the notebooks of luminaries Leonardo Da Vinci, John Locke, and Charles Darwin.