Project description
Student notebooks shed light on how knowledge was formed and transmitted
Academic success hinges on many factors. One of these is good note-taking skills. Good note-taking improves active listening as well as material comprehension and retention. However, it is not a new practice; students have been taking notes for hundreds of years. The EU-funded NOTA project will study medieval notebooks produced in the context of late medieval universities. By studying a corpus of Latin manuscripts, the project will delve deep into creative reflections on the motivation and the technical aspects involved in producing notebooks. Specifically, it will study the 14th and 15th centuries, when paper entered universities, elucidating how knowledge was formed and disseminated by means of note-taking.
Objective
Note-taking is a common intellectual practice. In academia, it is a universal endeavor that we share with students since the origin of the universities. Yet no one has focused on this practice as an original and independent object of research that, once investigated, will bring innovation and expand our knowledge of European intellectual history. Project NOTA is an ambitious enterprise, rooted in the discovery that decoding medieval notebooks produced in the context of late medieval universities will reveal invisible aspects of the process of producing scientific knowledge, of the European networking of scholars, and of the dynamic circulation of texts. Stemming from the Faculty of Theology during the 14th and 15th centuries, when paper invaded the university as an accessible material support, the student’s notebooks constitute the ideal laboratory in which we can investigate how knowledge was formed and disseminated by means of note-taking. It was one of the superior faculties, meaning that the note-takers had reached intellectual maturity, offering notes of better quality than those of students in the liberal arts. Proposing a unique corpus of Latin manuscripts, project NOTA will launch creative reflections on the motivation and the technical aspects involved in producing notebooks. The project will combine interdisciplinary approaches (doctrinal, codicological and paleographical) and will impact the present state of the art by showing the potential of data that can be obtained by deciphering the practice of note-taking. New concepts will be launched (classification of notebooks, technical practices), traces of unknown authors and texts will be identified, and connections between scholars, institutions and texts will be established, fully justifying the recognition of notebooks as a new subject in the field of intellectual history and as an element of cultural identity shared by universities all around Europe.
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
400084 Cluj Napoca
Romania