Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700–1830 by Matthew Daniel Eddy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700–1830 by Matthew Daniel Eddy
• Manon C. Williams (bio)

Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700–1830
By Matthew Daniel Eddy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 423.

In Media and the Mind, Matthew Daniel 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. The study is based on extensive archival material collected from university, school, library, and family archives across Scotland. Eddy structures his argument around John Locke’s metaphor of the tabula rasa, the mind as a blank page, through which Eddy expands on this misinterpreted conceptualization of Enlightenment learning. 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.

This study is extremely detailed and quite lengthy, containing interwoven arguments too numerous to expand upon here. It would appeal to historians of science and the Enlightenment, historians of education and childhood, and scholars of material culture and media. The book is divided into three parts, each encompassing a different educational phase: primary schools, academies, and universities. Within each part, the chapters cover a different skill that students learned and engaged with to illustrate a dynamic learning process. A particular strength of the book is how Eddy situates these students within the broader social, intellectual, and cultural processes of the eighteenth century, contributing to our understanding of the popular Enlightenment. His exploration of the often-neglected topic of childhood education and literacy is especially interesting (ch. 2), as is his analysis of the commodification of intellectual rights with regards to the circulation of university lectures in student notebooks (ch. 10).

Historians of technology will be especially interested in Eddy’s discussion of these notebooks as “paper machines,” a term drawn from media historian Markus Krajewski’s study of library index cards (Paper Machines, 2011). Eddy distinguishes student notebooks from a robust scholarship of “paper technologies,” employed by early modern cultural historians to describe the epistemic functions of paper records as material objects to organize and manage information. Summarizing Krajewski, Eddy writes: “As a material artifact, a ‘paper machine’ is a technology that consists of different paper components—slips, sheets, scraps—that are both crafted and set in motion by the human hand” (p. 6). The importance of movement and manipulability only becomes evident in chapter 3 on codexing, the practice of binding notebooks into a single informatic medium, which Eddy describes as “one [End Page 1054] of the most important paper machines that a student at the time could learn to create” (p. 85). Eddy argues that the manipulability of codices and the skills embedded within—from their assembly to their use as devices for information processing and retrieval—distinguishes them from other paper technologies. By the time students reached university, they had learned “to compress vast knowledge systems into paper machines,” allowing them to participate in the “knowledge economy” of the Enlightenment (p. 267).

Regardless of whether scholars are convinced by the utility of labeling notebooks as machines rather than technologies, Eddy’s analysis offers valuable insight into how student notebooks aided a dynamic learning process between the student, the notebook, and notekeeping. To Eddy, notebooks were not passive objects, used as repositories of accumulated knowledge or tools of information management. As personal “media technologies,” these notebooks allowed students to “interface with information in a meaningful and purposeful way” (p. 4). The kinesthetic and mnemonic qualities of student notebooks and notekeeping represented the “malleability of knowledge” (p. 86) central to understanding Locke’s tabula rasa metaphor. Eddy provides a convincing argument to reframe student notebooks as interactive technologies that facilitated a dynamic process of learning, agency, and the development of reasoning. There is potential here for scholars to apply these ideas to other forms of note- and recordkeeping.

Media and the Mind provides a beautifully illustrated, if at times convoluted, addition to the scholarship on paper technologies and information management. As a...