Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830

by Matthew Daniel Eddy

Overview

A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals notebooks as extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind.

We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, this book argues that notebooks were paper machines and that notekeeping was a capability-building exercise that enabled young notekeepers to mobilize everyday handwritten and printed forms of material and visual media in a way that empowered them to judge and enact the enlightened principles they encountered in the classroom. Covering a rich selection of material ranging from simple scribbles to intricate watercolor diagrams, the book reinterprets John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment, scholars seldom consider why it was so successful for those who used it. Each chapter uses one core notekeeping skill to reveal the fascinating world of material culture that enabled students in the arts, sciences, and humanities to transform the tabula rasa metaphor into a dynamic cognitive model. Starting in the home, moving to schools, and ending with universities, the book reconstructs the relationship between media and the mind from the bottom up. It reveals that the cognitive skills required to make and use notebooks were not simply aids to reason; rather, they were part of reason itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226820750
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/11/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Matthew Daniel Eddy is professor and chair in the history and philosophy of science at Durham University, UK. He is the author and editor of numerous works on the cultural history of Britain and its former empire.

Table of Contents

Bibliographic Note
Prologue
Introduction
1. Recrafting Notebooks
   The Tabula Rasa and Media Interface
   Notebooks as Artifacts
   Notekeeping as Artificing
   Notekeepers as Artificers
   Thought as a Realtime Activity
   Science as a System
   Book Outline

Part I: Inside the Tabula Rasa
2. Writing
   Writing as a Knowledge-Creating Tool
   The Place of Writing within Literacy
   Script and Observational Learning
   Grids and Verbal Pictures
   Copies and the Exercise of Memory
3. Codexing
   Paper Machines as Material Artifacts
   Paper as an Informatic Medium
   Quires and Knowledge Management
   Books and Customized Packaging
4. Annotating
   Revisibilia Made through Annotation
   Marginalia as Scribal Interface
   Paratexts and Editorial Training
   Ciphers and the Acquisition of Numeracy

Part II: Around the Tabula Rasa
5. Categorizing
   Headings as Realtime Categories
   Headings as Mnemonic Labels
   Headings as Visual Cues
   Headings as Coordinates for Scanpaths and Sightlines
6. Drawing
   Description and Movement across a Page
   Learning to Draw a Picture
   Figures as Developmental Tools
   Scenes as Observational Training
   Observation and the Utility of Perception
7. Mapping
   Mapkeepers and Knowledge Systems on Paper
   Map-Mindedness and Embodied Experience
   Desk Maps as Crafted Constructions
   Field-Mindedness in the Classroom
   Field Maps and Visualized Data
   Maps as Mnemonic Devices

Part III: Beyond the Tabula Rasa
8. Systemizing
   The Syllabus as a System and a Machine
   Lecture Notebooks and Knowledge Formation
   The Syllabus and Its Organizational Technologies
   Scroll Books and the Strategies of Realtime Learning
   Transcripts and the Extension of Memory
   Lines and the Media of the Mind
9. Diagramming
   Paths and Diagrammatic Knowledge
   Schemata as Useful Mnemonic Aids
   Shapes as Repurposed Perceptual Devices
   Pictograms and Visual Judgment
   Tables as Kinesthetic Diagrams
   Traces and Realtime Observation
10. Circulating
   Local and Global Networks
   Personal and Institutional Libraries
   Commodities within Knowledge Economies
   Courts of Law and Public Opinion

Conclusion
11. Rethinking Manuscripts
   The Tabula Rasa and Manuscripts
   Manuscripts as Dynamic Artifacts
   Manuscript Skills as Artifice
   Manuscript Keepers as Artificers
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
   Abbreviations
   Primary Sources
      Manuscripts and Ephemera
      Printed Primary Sources
   Secondary Sources
Index

Editorial Reviews

Eddy provides an insightful and thorough exploration of student notebooks from Enlightenment Scotland, arguing that these notebooks operated as ‘paper machines’ that facilitated cognitive processing and knowledge management. . . . Drawing on theories from disciplines as varied as anthropology, material culture, and cognitive science, he convincingly
demonstrates that the notekeepers and their notekeeping practices are just as important to investigate as the contents on the page.

Technology and Culture

Eddy proffers a well argued and richly illustrated work that would definitely attract attention from those interested in history, media archaeology, manuscript [research], and cultural technology studies.

European Review of History

In his theoretically sophisticated and highly reflective account, Eddy explores the paper machines of Scottish children and students during the long eighteenth century and shows how they coped with a broad range of cognitive challenges—from learning to write to depicting landscapes, and from adding numbers to understanding anatomy.

Annals of Science

This book will change fundamentally how we think about the Scottish Enlightenment. Drawing on a rich archive of notebooks, Eddy reveals a hidden world of experimentation and creativity in the learning process of eighteenth-century students. By refusing to take the fixed word on the page for granted, Eddy makes the familiar strange, showing us how embodied cognition operated with the help of paper machines and learning technologies. The famous image of the mind as a blank slate empowered students to experiment with the basic components of writing and thought. We will never think of Locke’s tabula rasa the same way again!

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

Recovering a forgotten youth culture of creativity and experimentation, one based in homes, at schools, and at the Scottish universities, Eddy makes ingenious use of mundane sources that few historians have noticed, and which in the main have languished within uncatalogued collections of family papers. . . . Media and the Mind shows that Enlightenment began at home, in everyday interactions with manuscript tools.

Eighteenth-Century Studies

This remarkable book turns the Enlightenment upside down. Based on pioneering research into hundreds of notebooks kept by eighteenth-century children and university students, Eddy brilliantly reveals how virtues of order, clarity, and accuracy were conveyed through practical processes of education. Thinking, he suggests, is a skill constructed over time, and the Age of Reason begins on the blank pages of paper notebooks.

James A. Secord

This intriguing, engaging, and wonderfully illustrated book examines the culture of notetaking in the schools and universities of Scotland in the long eighteenth century. This is a genuinely original and interdisciplinary project; with its focus on practice, it’s also a fresh and exciting one.

Angus Vine

This is a major study of a neglected and important topic, and it will be of interest to an array of scholars in fields as diverse as book history, manuscript culture, history of education, history of childhood, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and the Enlightenment broadly understood. Its central argument, that the student notebook should be considered as an artifact in which a variety of knowledge management skills were learned and deployed by its maker, is convincing, novel, and insightful, and the depth and range of scholarship here is remarkable.

University of Aberdeen Michael Brown

In an age in which artificial intelligence is all the rage, Eddy shows that human learning comes from a long tradition of reading and taking notes. Knowledge is not simply innate but the product of centuries of human practices of reading, notetaking, and interpreting everything from feelings to scientific data to shapes. This book makes one think that computers might need to learn how to doodle to creatively solve problems. Anyone wanting to understand the practices of complex learning and how humans manage data will need to read Eddy’s brilliant, meticulous, and authoritative history of notetaking.

Jacob Soll

Roughly fifteen pages into taking notes on Eddy’s extraordinary Media and the Mind, I realized that the very practice this book unveils was in effect at my fingertips and right before my eyes. I was doing what Eddy describes almost by habit. My notes, his book, and this review, are best described as ‘paper machines.’ I say best described because what’s so fascinating about the work done in Eddy’s text renders explicit and visible, maybe for the first time, what goes missing when we read written works and create them. What’s missing is ‘work,’ which is defined here as an active and generative process, rather than a text in some static sense. . . . There is lots to learn and even more to enjoy in Media and the Mind.

Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Eddy’s detailed interpretations of student notebooks, wonderful use of images, and engagement with an impressively diverse array of scholarship ensure that Media and the Mind will be of interest to a broad audience of historians of science and media. Through skillfully and meticulously reading objects that other scholars have overlooked, Eddy offers an important new perspective on the paper technologies that shaped the Scottish Enlightenment.” 

Isis