The Appointment That Became a Discovery: Why Fieldwork Begins Before the Interview

A field reflection from Saving the Burning Library — and a message to future Narrative Engineers. I returned to Porto San Pancrazio for what I thought would be a simple task: arrange an interview. I had already met an older resident who had shared memories connected to the neighbourhood, including a physical fragment associated with a Second World War bomb.

There was more to explore, so the immediate purpose of my return was straightforward. I wanted to agree on a date when we could sit down properly, turn on the camera and record a formal interview.

But when I arrived, other people were there, and the conversation naturally expanded beyond the appointment I had come to arrange. The man began identifying other people who might carry important memories of Porto San Pancrazio.

One was an elderly, retired and highly respected member of the community, and a formal interview with him was arranged for the following week. Other names emerged as well. Then the conversation produced something I had not expected at all: information about a local gathering place frequented by older residents.

What stayed with me most was the advice I received about approaching those people. The knowledge holder told me, essentially: “Go there, have a drink with them, and begin to get into the family.”

I kept thinking about that sentence afterward because it contained something much more important than directions to another place. It was a lesson about access. It was a lesson about trust. And perhaps most importantly, it was a reminder that the work of preserving community knowledge does not necessarily begin when the camera starts recording.

Sometimes it begins when somebody allows you to sit down.

The Field Does Not Respect Your Schedule

Fieldwork requires organisation. Appointments matter. People deserve to know why you want to speak with them. Equipment must be prepared, consent must be handled properly, and time and resources need to be documented. None of this becomes less important simply because community work can be unpredictable.

But the community does not organise itself according to our diary.

I had gone there to arrange one future interview. Instead, the encounter produced a confirmed interview, several potential knowledge holders, a community gathering point, a referral network and a lesson about community access. Had I judged the afternoon only according to what I had written in my schedule, I could have reduced everything that happened to one line: appointment arranged. Technically, that would have been correct. Methodologically, it would have been almost useless.

This is one of the reasons I am becoming increasingly cautious about measuring fieldwork only through completed interviews. You may go somewhere to deliver a flyer. You may return to thank someone. You may go to photograph an object or collect a document.

You may simply want to confirm an appointment. Yet while you are there, another person can enter the room, somebody can mention a name, an old photograph can appear, a relative can join the conversation, or someone can tell you about a place you didn’t know existed.

The task written in the diary tells you why you entered the field.

It does not necessarily tell you what the field will reveal.

From One Person to a Network

When I looked back at the sequence that brought us to this point, I realised how little of it had been planned in advance. An earlier encounter had revealed the wartime object. That object connected us with a knowledge holder and memories of the neighbourhood. Those memories created a reason to return.

The return visit produced an unplanned conversation. The conversation produced another recommended elder, a scheduled interview, additional referrals and a place where older residents gather.

The knowledge chain was beginning to look something like this:

Object → Knowledge Holder → Local Memory → Return Visit → Conversation → Referral → Elder → Interview → Gathering Place → Community Network

That sequence matters because I had originally encountered a person, but through that person I was beginning to encounter a network.

The distinction is fundamental.

A person can carry important knowledge, but a person can also know where other knowledge lives. They may know who remembers a particular period, who has photographs at home, which family has lived in the neighbourhood for generations, who operated a particular business, who witnessed an event, who has moved away, or which older person everybody respects.

At that point, the person is doing more than carrying knowledge.

They are connecting us to it.

The Knowledge Connector

I have started thinking of someone who performs this role as a Knowledge Connector.

A Knowledge Connector may be a knowledge holder themselves, but their importance extends beyond what they personally remember. They understand something about the social geography of the community. They know who remembers what, who should be interviewed, where people gather, who is trusted, who witnessed an earlier period and, sometimes, how someone from outside should approach the community.

This can dramatically expand the reach of a Narrative Engineer. Imagine entering a neighbourhood where you know almost nobody. You could spend weeks approaching people individually, explaining the project repeatedly and trying to determine who might have something important to contribute.

But if one trusted person understands the network and believes the work is worthwhile, that person can begin opening doors that would otherwise remain invisible.

This does not mean the connector decides who is important or that every recommendation must automatically become an interview. The Narrative Engineer still needs judgement. Each person still decides whether they want to participate. The project still needs to evaluate relevance, evidence, consent and context. But the connector provides something extremely valuable: orientation inside a knowledge network that already existed before we arrived.

That is why referrals should not be treated as trivial administrative information. When someone tells us, “You should speak with this person,” the relationship between those two people may itself help us understand how knowledge moves through the community.

Referral is part of the methodology.

Trust Can Travel Through Relationships

This encounter also made another phenomenon visible: trust can travel.

When a respected community member introduces a Narrative Engineer to another person, the second relationship does not necessarily begin from zero. The new person still needs to understand the project, decide independently whether to participate and give their own consent. Social trust and formal consent are not the same thing. But the introduction can change the conditions under which the new relationship begins.

The pattern can become:

A trusts the Narrative Engineer → A introduces the Narrative Engineer to B → B becomes more willing to engage → B may eventually introduce C → the knowledge network expands.

This matters enormously in community fieldwork. If every relationship must be built entirely from the outside, discovery can remain slow and superficial. But when trust begins moving through existing relationships, the community itself starts participating in the discovery process.

And that is very different from extraction.

We are no longer simply arriving with a list of questions and taking stories away. People begin helping identify what should be documented, who should be heard and where the Narrative Engineer should go next.

The community begins revealing its own library.

“Have a Drink and Get Into the Family”

That is why the advice about the gathering place deserves particular attention. I do not interpret “have a drink with them” as a literal requirement to consume alcohol. The methodological lesson is much deeper:

Enter the social environment before trying to extract its stories.

Spend time. Listen. Allow people to understand why you are there. Participate appropriately in the ordinary social rhythm of the place. Let familiarity develop. If people are sitting together talking, perhaps the first objective should not be to interrupt them with a camera and an interview request. Perhaps the first objective is simply to become present enough for a relationship to begin.

This is especially important when working with elders and close-knit communities. Someone may have spent eighty or ninety years accumulating memories and relationships. Why should we assume that the appropriate way to access that knowledge is to arrive as a stranger, put a camera in front of them and immediately begin asking questions?

Sometimes the better opening is simply:

“May I sit with you?”

The recording can come later.

This does not mean pretending to be someone’s friend merely to obtain access to their story. That would be another form of extraction. The relationship has to remain honest about why we are there. But honesty does not prevent familiarity, patience or human connection.

A Narrative Engineer should know how to ask questions.

We should also know when it is not yet time to ask them.

A Place Can Carry Memory

The recommendation of the older residents’ gathering place also changed how I think about locations. Initially, it would be easy to view such a place merely as somewhere useful for finding interviewees. Older residents gather there, therefore we can go there and identify people to interview.

But that may be too narrow.

The gathering place itself may be a Knowledge Node.

People meet there. Memories circulate there. Local events are discussed. Names are remembered. Relationships are maintained. People know who has died, who has moved away, who remembers particular periods and who possesses particular photographs or objects.

The place therefore does not simply contain people who have knowledge. The social activity occurring there may help maintain the community’s memory.

This makes me think about how many apparently ordinary places could perform the same function. A bar. A barber shop. A café. A church. A sports club. A market. A community centre. A park bench where the same group meets every afternoon. A shop where older residents stop even when they have very little to buy.

If we only see these places as locations, we may miss their deeper function.

A future Narrative Engineer should therefore ask not only:

“Who can I interview here?”

but:

“What role does this place play in carrying the memory of this community?”

That question can reveal an entirely different layer of the Living Library.

When the Community Keeps Returning to the Same Memory

Another pattern was beginning to appear during the Porto San Pancrazio fieldwork. The Second World War and the bombing of the area were repeatedly emerging in conversations with older residents. This is important precisely because I did not enter the neighbourhood saying, “I am going to make a project about the Second World War.” The subject kept returning through the community itself.

Under the Noise versus Signal principle, repetition across independent encounters can indicate an emerging signal worth investigating more carefully. That does not mean that after hearing the subject several times we should immediately declare, “Porto San Pancrazio is a wartime-memory community.” That would simply replace discovery with another predetermined narrative.

Instead, we record the recurrence.

We follow it.

We test it through additional encounters.

We ask what significance the people themselves attach to it.

This distinction protects the methodology from confirmation bias. If I decide in advance that war is the important story, I will naturally begin asking questions that produce more war stories. But if people independently return to the same history without being led there, then the repetition itself becomes evidence that something deserves closer attention.

The community should be allowed to reveal its themes before we decide what its themes are.

That may eventually influence the documentary. It may produce an entirely separate documentary. Or further fieldwork may complicate the pattern and reveal something different.

The important thing is not to decide too early.

Memory Has Generations

The wartime material also revealed something else. Not everybody who carries a memory of the same historical period carries the same kind of memory.

One person may have experienced an event directly. Another may have been a child during the immediate aftermath. Another may know what happened primarily because their parents repeatedly told the story. A younger resident may know only fragments, while somebody else may know almost nothing about it.

These testimonies are not interchangeable.

They potentially allow us to follow a progression:

Experienced memory → Inherited memory → Community memory → Disappearing memory.

This is where ONBA — Our Now, Before and After — becomes particularly powerful.

Before asks: What happened?

Now asks: Who still remembers it, and how does the place carry that history today?

After asks: What happens when the remaining carriers of those memories are gone?

That is not merely historical research. It is the study of memory transmission. We are not only interested in the original event. We are interested in what happened to the knowledge of the event afterward. Who carried it? Who inherited it? What physical evidence remained? What changed in the telling? What does the next generation know?

And at what point does living memory become impossible to recover?

That is exactly where the Burning Library becomes visible.

Zero Interviews Can Still Mean Valuable Fieldwork

Perhaps the strongest lesson from this particular experience is one I want to preserve carefully:

The interview is not the unit of discovery. The encounter is.

An interview is a deliberate recording event. It preserves testimony in a form that can later be reviewed, analysed, connected and preserved. It remains one of the most important tools in the work.

But an encounter is larger.

An encounter can produce knowledge, relationships, referrals, objects, places, observations, trust, questions, contradictions and future pathways. A Narrative Engineer could therefore spend an afternoon in the field, conduct zero formal interviews, and still make an extremely valuable contribution to the Living Library.

Imagine spending two hours somewhere and discovering three knowledge holders, receiving two trusted introductions, identifying a gathering place, finding a photograph, establishing a relationship with an elder and recognising a recurring theme that changes the direction of the following week’s work.

If the only metric is “interviews completed: zero,” that afternoon appears unsuccessful.

But it clearly wasn’t.

This is why we have to distinguish production from discovery. Interviews are measurable outputs. Discovery is the process that makes meaningful interviews possible.

And much of the cost of preservation occurs before anybody presses record.

A Message to a Future Narrative Engineer

If you are reading or listening to this years from now while preparing to enter a community somewhere else, remember this: go with a purpose, but remain open. Know why you are there. Prepare properly. Respect people’s time. Keep good records. Follow consent procedures. But do not become so attached to today’s task that you stop noticing what the community is revealing around it.

If an unexpected conversation develops, listen. If another knowledge holder is mentioned, record the referral. If an introduction is offered, follow it appropriately. If a significant object appears, document the connection with permission.

If a gathering place is identified, ask whether that place itself carries community memory. If the same subject keeps appearing independently, record it as an emerging signal rather than immediately turning it into a conclusion. And when somebody explains how their community should be approached, treat that advice as knowledge too.

• Then write the observation down while it is still fresh.
• Do not wait for the formal interview before deciding that fieldwork has happened.
• The conversation before the interview is fieldwork.
• The introduction is fieldwork.
• The return visit is fieldwork.
• The time spent sitting with people is fieldwork.
• The referral is fieldwork.
• The discovery of the place where memory circulates is fieldwork.
• These things are not administrative obstacles standing between us and the “real work.”

They are part of the real work.

Sometimes the First Skill Is Learning How to Sit

I went to Porto San Pancrazio to arrange one interview. I left with the interview arranged, several new names, another place to investigate and a deeper understanding of how trust and knowledge move through a community.

But perhaps the most important thing I left with was that simple instruction:

Go there. Sit with them. Begin to enter the family.

There is something profound in that for the future of Saving the Burning Library. We are developing methodology, databases, Living Libraries, documentaries and systems capable of preserving and connecting knowledge. All of those things matter. But none of the technology can replace the human moment in which somebody decides that you may sit beside them and listen.

• The archive comes later.
• The documentary comes later.
• The database comes later.
• Sometimes even the interview comes later.
• First, there is a person.
• Then there is a relationship.
• Then perhaps a door opens.

That is why I would preserve the field rule that emerged from this encounter almost exactly as it was written:

Arrive with a purpose. Listen beyond the purpose. Follow the knowledge. Follow the relationships. Follow the places. And when the community opens another door, don’t ignore it simply because it wasn’t on today’s schedule.

Because sometimes you leave home thinking you are going to arrange an interview.

And instead, the community teaches you how to enter.

You may go to arrange one interview and discover the entrance to an entire library.