On the merits of documentation

Since coming to grad school, I've developed a serious addiction to documentation. It all started innocuously when I decided during my first year that it was about time I learned LaTeX, and what better way to start than to type up all of my notes in LaTeX to be preserved in searchable, digital format.

When I graduated college it was incredibly sad to dump all of my painstakingly-collected class notes into the recycling. As much as I wanted to keep them, I knew I would never look at them again, and they would just collect dust as I lugged them across country. I was determined not to let that happen again.

Nowadays, I take detailed digital notes every day of all of my ideas and activities using a freeware program called SEOnote. Although standard word processing documents only allow you to take notes in essentially one dimension, SEOnote adds several more dimensions with a folder and tree structure which can embed links to external documents and the internet. Another application I use fairly often is Google Notebook. Embedded in your browser, Google Notebook allows you to save snippets of text and images from webpages for future reference. I use this mainly to remember books, movies, and music I read about on the web and want to check out later.

Another factor which lead into my descent into my documentation obsession is that economics is an extremely soft science in the sense that the vast majority of its knowledge is embodied in tacit, unstandardized forms. Unlike mathematics, whose workings are laid bare to anyone who has the talent to understand them, success in economics still rests heavily on being in the know - knowing what kinds of data are available, what kinds of tools people are using, and what kinds of topics people are interested in.

Being an empiricist, I found it especially frustrating that many quite standard data sets are not well documented, and many researchers must be expending enormous amounts of redundant effort discovering and fixing known flaws. More documentation, codification, and standardization of knowledge in economics would go a long way toward increasing the rate of progress in our field and making the process of research fairer and more scientific. But alas, even comparatively cooperative academics are really fierce competitors at heart, and as long as personal advantages can be had by keeping data and expertise private, the field suffers as a result. In any case, the desire to codify and share knowledge on the process of social science put me in a documentation frenzy with the Sloan PhD handbook and a website of finance research resources.

Finally, another experience which has convinced me of the power of documentation is working with student groups, particularly MIT's campus sustainability movement which happily, has recently begun to build momentum. One of the hallmarks of any kind of student activity is meetings, lots and lots of meetings. But what has surprised me is that while we have ready technology to take and transmit detailed notes (i.e. laptops), most groups I have been a part of haven't taken full advantage of them. As a result, much of what is discussed at meetings is promptly forgotten, and even worse, most of the ideas that meetings are so great at generating never begin to be implemented. Given that we all have a natural tendency to dream up lofty ideas than to do anything about them, an organization in which meeting notes are not promptly distributed is an organization I do NOT want to be a part of.

Furthermore, any serious student movement suffers from serious institutional memory loss. When students are turning over every year, a huge amount of embodied knowledge and experience is lost without thoughtful and concerted effort toward documentation and codification.

To add some empirical evidence as to the merits of documentation, I recently read the very compelling story of how doctors and surgeons were able to dramatically improve combat casualty rates in the Iraq war through diligence, ingenuity, and yes, documentation. Reading about how physicians in the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad stayed up nights in the midst of fierce battle and chaos to enter 75 pieces of data on every casualty so they could track and adapt quickly to the needs of soldiers, I can't help but feel emboldened in my belief that documentation, in its mundane yet under-appreciated way, can do a great deal to make the world a better place.