John Acorn, Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta presented a seminar on Thursday, October 6 2011 at 12.30 p.m. in the Wyatt Lecture Room (236 Earth Sciences Building) University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.

Despite pessimism in the book publishing industry, the last decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of field guides. The market for these books stems from: a trend toward regional treatments, new biological information, coverage of non-traditional field guide subjects, and trends in book design. Various authors, illustrators and publishers favour differing approaches to such elements as habitus illustration, range maps, phenology, taxonomy, habitat, and field recognition, and these differences are interpreted here in terms of a framework recently developed by historians of science (“Objectivity,” Daston and Galison 2007). The future of print field guides is tied to the book industry as a whole, but digital field guides will likely continue to proliferate, and in the process blur the distinction between field guide and taxonomic monograph. For those of us working on field guides and similar materials, it is worth considering how field guides are actually used, and how the cognitive process of “learning a group” actually happens.