Roughly fifteen pages into taking notes on Eddys 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 whats so fascinating about the work done in Eddys text renders explicit and visible, maybe for the first time, what goes missing when we read written works and create them. Whats 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 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 * 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 challengesfrom learning to write to depicting landscapes, and from adding numbers to understanding anatomy. * Annals of Science * Eddys 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 * 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 * 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 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. * Michael Brown, University of Aberdeen * 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, its also a fresh and exciting one. -- Angus Vine, University of Stirling 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 Eddys brilliant, meticulous, and authoritative history of notetaking. -- Jacob Soll, University of Southern California 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, Cambridge University 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 Lockes tabula rasa the same way again! -- Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, University of Chicago
