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

Abstract

Studies on early modern student notetaking have gained momentum in recent decades. 1 Some practices were elaborate.Students in German universities, for example, used a technique called Schreibechor, or "writing chorus," in which teams attempted to capture every word spoken by a preacher or professor.2 Students pencilled notes in their pockets in Holland, copied Newtonian notations in Cambridge, replicated manuscript notebooks at Harvard, scribbled marginalia in St.Andrews, implemented notetaking procedures in Rome, and employed commonplacing in Paris.3 Rather than using the same routines, students developed varied techniques in relation to the kinds of information that they needed to learn.Thus, whereas notes of some Cambridge students were influenced by what they were taught by elite coaches in small tutorials, the Schreibechor technique was developed and honed by students taking notes in sermons.In Scottish universities the process surrounding the lecture notes taken by students was similarly tailored.It existed within a system of education in which lectures increasingly constituted the main (and sometimes only) form of formal instruction before students were examined at the end of their degree.At present we lack a clear picture of the scale or scope of this student notetaking process in Scotland as it played out on a material or graphic level in such settings-this is in The Interactive Notebook 2 spite of the fact that some of the most revered scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment were shaped profoundly by their education at the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Aberdeen.How did students use their notes to keep track of the information they learned?I address this question by examining the lecture notebooks kept by students who attended Scottish universities during the long eighteenth century.These notebooks, along with their associated ephemera, are housed in collections across Europe, Britain and its former colonies, and beyond.Since the largest number of extant notebooks were made after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, and since the Scottish Enlightenment has traditionally been seen as ending shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, I give special attention to notebooks made between 1745 and 1820.4 I begin by explaining why the lecture notebook is an important object of enquiry and I move on to discuss the nature and meaning of the skills and routines that were employed to make and use one.In the end we will see that student notebooks were papertools, that is, "productive tools for work on paper," which required and instilled a host of graphic (particularly scribal) practices.5 As such, they served as interactive platforms of information management for both students and professors.Excavating the graphic skills employed to use and make notes and notebooks will require us to showcase the lives of students whom time has forgotten.My method is influenced by the work of Michel De Certeau, Richard Sennett, Donald A.Norman, and Tim Ingold, all of whom place great value on the materially-embedded routines of everyday life, and who consequently concentrate on the shared practices that shape and guide how we make and circulate knowledge.6 As we will see, such

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