My ideas about field work mostly come from my experiences in studying Biology during my undergraduate degree. It's possible my ideas of what makes something the field are more traditional because of this, but for me they're tied up in ideas of both location and the ability to control variables.
Most of my courses had a laboratory component of some kind. Most of those courses involved working in a lab to dissect a specimen and observe it, or examine some slides in a microscope, or occasionally follow experimental procedures. However, the course that made the greatest impression on me was Plant Functional Ecology, a field ecology course, which involved bi-weekly visits to different forests and fields set aside for study.
In all cases the experiments and procedures followed in my courses were long-established, traditional methodologies. In each case, a certain result was expected, as undergraduate labs are designed around well known information. And in all cases, unexpected variations occurred. In a dissection laboratory, a fish might unexpectedly have been pregnant, altering the observed anatomy. An ill-prepared slide may be hard to observe. A chemical reaction might not occur to the expected degree. The nature of experimentation, especially when performed by inexperienced and tired undergrads, leads to such incidents, and it's part of the process to examine research after the fact and look at what may have caused the observed results, either as false positives or as unexpected negatives.
However, the main thing I learned in doing field work in the sciences is that there is much more unpredictability and variation in the field. This may seem obvious in retrospect, but until I tried to explain why species abundances along a gradient tract refused to match an expected curve I don't think I really understood the difference between the controlled conditions of a laboratory experiment and the infinite uncontrolled variables out in the field.
This might all seem hard to apply to information research, because knowledge work and libraries are so far removed from the muddy work of field ecology. However, I think the major take away for me about the difference between field and non-field experiments was that in the field, rather than controlling variables we accounted for their uncontrolled nature, or controlled them artificially through sampling.
Another blog entry this week mentioned usability testing as field work, but working from my own experience - both in ecology and in usability testing - I think I would challenge that assertion. Traditionally, usability testing is done in a usability lab under controlled conditions, where a member of a user group is given precise, artificial tasks to complete. Their attempts are observed and their reactions to the process are recorded. This is clearly an experiment intended to get as close as possible to the actual user experience in the field, when the product is "live", but it isn't truly in the field. The user comes to the lab - again, traditionally. In some cases the usability team does in fact relocate to the user's home environment, and that may be close to a field study, but the tasks are still inorganically initiated, and they occur outside of the real framework they would be completed in.
In my research project, I'm focusing on the research approaches taken by undergraduate students exposed for the first time to medieval manuscripts. My study will occur in the field, as the subjects will be students of an actual course and will be approaching their research for the purpose of the course. While I intend to use usability-style post-task questionnaires and procedures as part of my methodology, I wouldn't consider my study one that uses usability methodology because the "tasks" will be much less controlled - they will simply be defined as the research procedures involved in completing the course.
I may be coming off as a bit of a field research snob here, but what I think is important to remember is that a lot of very valuable and important research occurs far, far away from the field. Field research is unpredictable and messy, and useful for exploring new research areas or developing new theories, but without controlled replication and determination of causation nothing can ever come of those theories. Pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge is wonderful, but the real value of research is the ultimate benefits it can have for those outside of academia once it becomes actionable.
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