Firsthand observation and documentation of folklore. Fieldwork is the key research act for most scholarship in folklore, anthropology, and oral history. ln 1964, Richard M. Dotson wrote, “What the state paper is to the historian and creative work to the literary scholar, the oral traditional text is---or should hc-to the student of folklore.” Today, few folklorists would limit the field; gathered information to “texts,” and many could not even agree on what the word text means, yet Dorson’s observation still holds true.