“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 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 challenges—from learning to write to depicting landscapes, and from adding numbers to understanding anatomy.”

Annals of Science

“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, it’s 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 Eddy’s 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 Locke’s tabula rasa the same way again!”

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, University of Chicago