Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-grxwn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T01:44:32.710Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Shape of Knowledge: Children and the Visual Culture of Literacy and Numeracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2013

Matthew Daniel Eddy
Matthew Daniel Eddy*
Affiliation:
Durham University Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

The argument

In 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to inscribe and visualize knowledge on paper. This essay addresses this lacuna by using recently located student notebooks, drawings, and marginalia alongside textbooks and instructional literature to identify the graphic tools and skills that were taught to Scottish children in early modern classrooms. I show that, in addition to learning the facts of the curriculum, students participated in educational routines that enabled them to learn how to visually package knowledge into accessible figures and patterns of information, thereby making acts of inscription and visualization meaningful tools that benefitted both the self and society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 26 , Special Issue 2: Knowledge in the Making , June 2013 , pp. 215 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anon. 1787. Perth Academy Notebooks, 3 vols. Bound MS, NLS MS 14294-6.Google Scholar
Anon. The Principles of Latin and English Grammar, DH LIB 247.Google Scholar
Anon. Scrapbooks of Engravings (Including Dabbities), Etchings and Watercolours, 1800–1820, Bound MS, NLS MS 1072.Google Scholar
Adam, Alexander. 1772. Rudiments of Latin and English. Edinburgh: Kincaid and Creech.Google Scholar
Ambrose, Gavin, and Harris, Paul. 2007. The Layout Book. Lausanne: AVA Publishing.Google Scholar
Bannerman, Patrick. 1773. Letters Containing a Plan of Education for Rural Academies. London: J. Murray.Google Scholar
Barchas, Janine. 2003. Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Barrie, Alexander. 1796. A Spelling and Pronouncing Catechism. Edinburgh: publisher unknown.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. 2009. Why Hasn't Everything Disappeared? Translated by Turner, Chris. London: Seagull Books.Google Scholar
Benderson, Benjamin B., and Shneiderman, Ben, eds. 2003. The Craft of Information Visualization. London: Morgan Kaufmann.Google Scholar
Blacklock, Thomas. Kalokagathia: Or The Doctrine of Practical Ethics and Natural Theology, anonymous transcriber, Bound MS, EUL Dc.3.45, and Bound MS EUL La.III.80.Google Scholar
Blair, Ann M. 2008. “Student Manuscripts and the Textbook.” In Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, edited by Campi, Emidio, de Angelis, Simone, Goeing, Anja-Silvia, and Grafton, Anthony, 39–73. Geneva: Droz.Google Scholar
Blair, Ann M. 2011. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Butterworth, Edmund. 1785. Universal Penman. Edinburgh: G. Robinson.Google Scholar
Card, Stuart K., Mackinlay, Jock D., and Shneiderman, Ben, eds. 1999. Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.Google Scholar
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Rendall, Steven. London: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Chapman, George. 1774. A Treatise on Education with a Sketch of the Author's Method, Second Edition, Corrected and Enlarged. London: T. Cadell.Google Scholar
Chartier, Roger. 1994. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Translated by Cochrane, Lydia G.. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Church of Scotland. 1644. The A.B.C. or a Catechism for Young Children. London.Google Scholar
Dunbar, James. 1710. A Volume Completed by James Dunbar in 1710 containing Arithmetic, Introduction to Algebra, and A More Compendious Way of Writeing than Ordinar Called the Short Hand, Making Use of Farthing's Alphabet, Bound MS, NLS Acc 5706/11.Google Scholar
Eddy, Matthew D. 2010a. “The Alphabets of Nature: Children, Books and Natural History in Scotland, circa 1750–1800.” Nuncius 25:1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eddy, Matthew D. 2010b. “Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus's Philosophia Botanica.” Intellectual History Review 20:227–252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ewing, Alexander. 1771. A Synopsis of Practical Mathematics. Edinburgh: Smellie.Google Scholar
Fisher, George. 1799. The Instructor: or, Young Man's Best Companion. Edinburgh: J. Ruthven and Sons.Google Scholar
Gardiner, Howard. 1990. Art Education and Human Development. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust.Google Scholar
Goody, Jack. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gray, James. 1794. A Concise Spelling Book. Edinburgh: George Caw.Google Scholar
Grenby, Matthew O., ed. 2011. The Child Reader, 1700–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grey, Richard. 1756. Memoria Technica: Or, a New Method of Artificial Memory. London: Lintot.Google Scholar
Hartley, James. 1994. Designing Instructional Text. London: Kogan Page.Google Scholar
Heesen, Anke te. 2004. The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. Translated by Hentschel, Ann M.. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Herodotus, . 1704. Herodiani historiarum libri 8. Recogniti & notis illustrate. Oxford: G. West & Ant. Peisley, DH LIB 982.Google Scholar
Hoppus, Edward. 1799. Practical Measuring Made Easy to the Meanest Capacity by a New Set of Tables. Edinburgh: Hunter.Google Scholar
Houston, R. A. 2002. Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy in Scotland and Northern England, 1600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Immel, Andrea. 2005. “Frederick Lock's Scrapbook: Patterns in the Pictures and Writing in the Margins.” The Lion and the Unicorn 29:65–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, H. J. 2002. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kames, Lord [Henry Home]. 1781. Loose Hints upon Education. Edinburgh: J. Bell and J. Murray.Google Scholar
Klein, Ursula. 2003. Experiments, Models, Paper Tools: Cultures of Organic Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Law, Alexander. 1965. Education in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century. London: University of London Press.Google Scholar
Lenoir, Timothy, ed. 1998. Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Locke, John. 1693. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: A. and J. Churchill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luckombe, Philip. 1771. The History of the Art of Printing. London: Aldard, Brown, Johnson.Google Scholar
Mair, John. 1779. A Radical Vocabulary, Latin and English. The Fifth Edition. Edinburgh: Creech.Google Scholar
Masson, Arthur. 1757. An English Spelling Book. Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour and Neill.Google Scholar
McLuhan, Marshall, and Fiore, Quentin. 1996. The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
McLuhan, Marshall. 2011. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Michael, Ian. 1993. Early Textbooks of English: A Guide. Reading: Colloquium on Textbooks, Schools and Society.Google Scholar
Moir, James. 1775. The Scholar's Vade Mecum; or a New Dictionary of Latin and English. Edinburgh: James and Alexander Donaldson.Google Scholar
Nasmyth, James. 1883. James Nasmyth, Engineer: An Autobiography, edited by Smiles, Samuel. London: Murray.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norman, Donald A. 2002. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
O'Malley, Andrew. 2003. The Making of the Modern Child: Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ogborn, Miles. 2007. Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, Walter. 2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ong, Walter. 2005. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Perkins, David N. 1994. The Intellectual Eye: Learning to Think by Looking at Art. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust.Google Scholar
Perkins, David, and Ritchhart, Ron. 2004. “When Is Good Thinking?” In Motivation, Emotion, and Cognition: Integrative Perspectives on Intellectual Function and Development, edited by Dai, David Yun and Sternberg, Robert J., 351–384. Mahwah: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Richardson, Alan. 1994. Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ritchhart, Ron, Palmer, Patricia, Church, Mark, and Tishman, Shari. 2006. “Thinking Routines: Establishing Patterns of Thinking in the Classroom,” paper presented at American Educational Research Association Conference, April, San Francisco.Google Scholar
Safier, Neil. 2008. Measuring the World: Enlightenment Science and South America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherman, William H. 2009. Used Books: Making Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Towsey, Mark R. M. 2010. Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turkle, Sherry, ed. 2007. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tversky, Barbara, Zacks, Jeff, Lee, Paul, Heiser, Julie. 2000. “Lines, Blobs, Crosses, and Arrows: Diagrammatic Communication with Schematic Figures.” In Theory and Application of Diagrams, edited by Anderson, M., Cheng, P., and Haarslev, V., 221–230. Berlin: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tversky, Barbara. 2000. “Some Ways that Maps and Graphs Communicate.” In Spatial Cognition II: Integrating Abstract Theories, Empirical Studies, Formal Methods, and Practical Applications, edited by Freksa, C., Brauer, W., Habel, C., and Wender, K. F., 72–79. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tversky, Barbara. 2001. “Spatial Schemas in Depictions.” In Spatial Schemas and Abstract Thought, edited by Gattis, Meredith, 19–112. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tversky, Barbara. 2011. “Visualising Thought.” Topics in Cognitive Science 3:499–535.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vickery, Amanda. 1998. The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Warden, John. 1757 A Spelling Book. Edinburgh: publisher unknown.Google Scholar
Wilson, Duncan K. 1935. The History of Mathematical Teaching in Scotland to the End of the Eighteenth Century. London: University of London Press.Google Scholar
Withers, Charles W.J. 2001. Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since 1520. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by Anscombe, G.E.M.. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar