Lindgren 1 Nic Lindgren 10/20/2024 ENC 1102 Dr. Barnickel A Guide to Field Guides Research Question: How do different field guides for wild plants use structure, language/vocabulary, iconography, and rhetorical devices to help identify plants and their uses? Literature Review Plant field guides come in many different forms, but they are all still recognizable as field guides, whether they’re digital or analog, professional or casual. Genres evolve to reflect a community’s values (Clary-Lemon 159), which can be seen in how, while they can vary, all field guides have a recognizable structure. A modern field guide can be defined as a taxonomically organized checklist containing detailed descriptions accompanied by illustrations or images (Farnsworth 891). The prose in a field guide can vary in jargon depending on its audience. For example, a field guide intended for use by professional botanists will use more complex terms that said audience will be familiar with, as opposed to field guides aimed towards public or amateur use, which would use more accessible language. The article “Next-Generation Field Guides” by Elizabeth J. Farnsworth goes into detail about various forms of field guides, the methods they use, their importance, and ways to create them. In talking about new methods arising in the creation of field guides, another source I looked at is mentioned within this article; a great incidental instance of intertextuality. “First

Lindgren 2 Steps toward an Electronic Field Guide for Plants” by Guarav Agarwal is cited by Farnsworth, which talks about the process of this team’s efforts to create an electronic field guide called Leafsnap. They are utilizing 3D models and digital images as well as advanced search engines, including a system that can automatically determine which plant a leaf belongs to just by using a photo. This database is very accessible to the public in being a free app, and uses easy to understand language. I found the unique medium for this field guide very compelling for the genre, as it was one of the only fully online field guides I found while researching. Another unique field guide I found in my research is talked about in an article by Megan Franks. It describes the process of fourth and fifth-grade science class’s creation of a field guide for their local plants. The class is that of a charter school in Central Texas, and in the year the article describes, they focused on the plants of the local Blackwater Prairie. Franks goes on to explain the processes by which the students created their guides, as well as the educational goals and benefits. It also includes the rubric they used, and encourages other schools and educators to take inspiration from this project. I found this example very compelling, because while it is a less accurate or professional means of creating a field guide, they still follow the same or similar format and methods of research when doing so. This provides insight to key parts of the structure that makes a plant field guide recognizable as such, like pictures, descriptions, and facts. Albeit college age, another field guide created by students is one talked about by Frederica Bowcutt. Her article describes the process in which Evergreen State College students took to create a field guide for plants of the camas prairies in the Puget Sound area of Washington in order to support the efforts for Indigenous food sovereignty as well as ones for ecological restoration. The article also describes the idea of “decolonizing botanical knowledge”,

Lindgren 3 and how this project is meant to help students in doing so.This article not only describes the process in making their field guide, but includes lots of intertextual and interdisciplinary topics such as anti colonialism and historical ecology. An article by William Rubel also has some interesting interdisciplinary points. It focuses on mushroom field guides, and how the information within them can vary depending on where the guide is from. Specifically, it talks about the edibility and toxicity of the mushroom Amanita muscaria, and how it is widely labeled and written off as highly poisonous and inedible, despite the fact that it does have uses if prepared properly. It’s discussed how this, along with other similar instances, is due to cultural biases and ideas about what is edible and what isn’t. While this article focuses on mushroom field guides, I’m sure these biases can be found in plant field guides as well, and the intersection of cultural bias and science is an interesting influence on the content within a field guide. Circling back to the form and structure of field guides, “Empirical Trials of Plant Field Guides” by W.D. Hawthorne describes research about how different formats of three image-based field guides can affect the identification accuracy of the plants they include. The guides were for plants in the tropical forests of Ghana, Grenada and Cameroon, and were tested with local residents and some botanists from the United Kingdom. They tested different image formats, including drawings, photographs, and paintings, and compared the users’ accuracy to their accuracy when only using their prior knowledge. The usability and beauty of each variation was also tested, the results of which were that digital color photos were ranked the highest. They also found that there was not a significant difference in identification accuracy between image formats, with the exception of drawings yielding less accurate identifications in Grenada.

Lindgren 4 The experiment detailed in this article touches on some of the core features that make a plant field guide, since it discusses differences in the visual part of the formatting. The results of this article help me prove that variation in the formatting of a guide doesn’t necessarily impact its credibility. I saved this article for last because I don’t think I will end up citing it in my final paper, but it has proved very useful in helping me identify and critically think about intertextuality. Frank J. D’Angelo’s “The Rhetoric of Intertextuality” is an essay about intertextuality and rhetoric within nontraditional genres and concepts. It talks about different modes of intertextuality and where they appear, as well as the traits of each mode. This article/essay was helpful to me as I am doing an analysis of a less traditional genre, and helped me to more easily discuss intertextuality in plant field guides. I also have more sources that are examples of actual field guides that I want to include in my final paper to help show the variation in how field guides can look, but I haven’t included them here since they are books rather than scholarly articles.

Lindgren 5 Works Cited Agarwal, Gaurav, et al. “First Steps toward an Electronic Field Guide for Plants.” Taxon, vol. 55, no. 3, 2006, pp. 597–610. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/25065637. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024. Bowcutt, Frederica. “Creation of a Field Guide to Camas Prairie Plants with Undergraduates: Project-Based Learning Combined with Epistemological Decolonization.” Ethnobiology Letters, vol. 12, no. 1, 2021, pp. 21–31. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48646118. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024. Clary-Lemon, Jennifer, Derek Mueller, and Kate Pantelides. “Research and the Rhetorical Forms it Takes.” Try This: Research Methods for Writers. WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado University Press, 2000, pp. 155-165. D’Angelo, Frank J. “The Rhetoric of Intertextuality.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2010, pp. 31–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25655982. Accessed 29 Sept. 2024. Farnsworth, Elizabeth J., et al. “Next-Generation Field Guides.” BioScience, vol. 63, no. 11, 2013, pp. 891–99. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2013.63.11.8. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024. Franks, Megan, and Rebecca Vore. “How to Make a Plant Field Guide: Students Discover the Biodiversity of Plants in Their Surroundings.” Science and children vol. 47, no. 5, 2010, p. 21. Gale Academic OneFile Select, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A216960386/EAIM?u=orla57816&sid=bookmark-EAIM&xid=f 3d9898d. Accessed 29 Sept. 2024.

Lindgren 6 Hawthorne, W. D., et al. “Empirical Trials of Plant Field Guides.” Conservation Biology, vol. 28, no. 3, 2014, pp. 654–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24480327. Accessed 29 Sept. 2024. Rubel, William, and David Arora. “A Study of Cultural Bias in Field Guide Determinations of Mushroom Edibility Using the Iconic Mushroom, Amanita Muscaria, as an Example.” Economic Botany, vol. 62, no. 3, 2008, pp. 223–43. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40390460. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.