• DOI:10.1353/BH.2016.0002
• Corpus ID: 151427109

The Interactive Notebook: How Students Learned to Keep Notes during the Scottish Enlightenment

@article{Eddy2016TheIN,
  title={The Interactive Notebook: How Students Learned to Keep Notes during the Scottish Enlightenment},
  author={Matthew Daniel Eddy},
  journal={Book History},
  year={2016},
  volume={19},
  pages={131 - 86}
}

• M. Eddy
• Published 1 August 2016
• History
• Book History

Concentrating on the rich tradition of graphic culture that permeated Scotland’s universities during the long eighteenth century, this essay argues that student lecture notebooks were a sophisticated form of scribal media. I reveal that they were inscribed, assembled, bound, bought, sold, disassembled, edited, annotated, pirated, plagiarized, and circulated in a manner that transformed them into tools through which students learned to interactively manage knowledge on paper. In following this path, I transform student notetaking into a dynamic activity that played a central role in shaping the knowledge economy so characteristically associated with the Scottish Enlightenment.