The narratives/images tab at the unit level in Kiosk is your tool for journalling and for images that represent the unit as a whole not just contexts.
Create a new narrative:
What do you use narratives for? Anything you like! We’ve had projects track the weather, or the team members present in the trench on that day. Lots of projects journal about decisions being made, plans for the day, mistakes that are made while digging, anything that is process-related. You can create an infinite number of narratives per unit.
Create a new image:
You can create an infinite number of images per unit, too, and can give them brief descriptions. Beginning- and end-of-day shots, photos of the whole unit to draw on to indicate the boundaries of contexts, even candids, which make such great photos for presentations. This is the place to put a daily plan showing progress, too.
Link images and narratives:
You can create infinitely long lists of narratives and images that are not linked – they act independently. But! You can also link them if you want to. Popping up a narrative lets you see images beside it in larger scale, and to create links. An image can be linked to more than one narrative. And a narrative can be linked to more than one image (you know us by now; an infinite number in both cases). Why is this useful? If you have both images and narratives that describe the same process you can make sure they go together; it can even help you make sure you have gotten the documentation you need to adequately describe and show what it is you’re talking about.
Anna Soifer (whose request led to the linking feature, rolled out in 2023) talks about how she uses it:
“Speaking as an area co-supervisor (Progetto S’Urachi), one of the most useful features of the Kiosk recording system is the ability to link individual narrative entries to specific images. It’s like being able to draw a plan or sketch an artifact next to a text entry in a traditional paper notebook, but infinitely more flexible because you can connect as many images as you want (without having to estimate how many pages to save), as well as a much wider variety of images (e.g., plans, sections, aerial photos, feature photos, object photos) to the narrative. The added bonus is that any of those images can have been annotated first. For example, for a given narrative, I’ve been known to attach a clean aerial photo, an aerial photo annotated with the locations and names of the relevant contexts, an up-to-date plan drawn on TouchDraw, and one or more images of interesting features mentioned in my notes. The linking feature makes organizing records the work of a moment and is particularly useful when going back through documentation at the end of the season to write the area’s report. I cannot stress enough how much of a difference the linking feature made when it was introduced!”