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The documentation debate revolves around whether or not to video record child assessment interviews. In the 1980s, a videotape of the child’s interview promised to be a solution to the documentation dilemma and a substitute for child testimony in court. Videos haven’t been entirely satisfactory in meeting either goal. This chapter covers various forms of documentation such as audiotaping and note taking, the professional debate about documentation, advantages and disadvantages of videotaping, and offers suggestions about how to and whether to videotape.

Cognitive performance of the participants has crucial significance for legal trials, sometimes making the difference between fair and unfair verdicts. Jury members are expected to passively listen to long arguments, often about unfamiliar subjects, retain that information and then perform an unbiased deliberation to reach a just verdict. There are many natural cognitive limitations that impair this process: inattention, sleepiness, stress, the fallibility of human memory and our cognitive biases. Could juror cognition be improved, and would this improve the legal process? This chapter compares external aids such as notetaking with biomedical aids such as cognition enhancement drugs. It appears likely that enhancement drugs might improve juror cognition if used well, and in any case at least some jurors are likely already using them. There is also the possibility that some of them might introduce cognitive biases. However, given the low bar required for juror competence these biases might be regarded as acceptable, especially compared to the biases inherent in the deliberation process itself.

Although Coleridge is mostly known for being a copious talker who was impossible to transcribe, this chapter recovers Coleridge’s role as transcriber, theorist of transcription practices, and inventor of his own idiosyncratic shorthand. Considering Coleridge’s time as a parliamentary reporter, his self-reflexive notebook entries, and the history of stenography, this chapter posits that Coleridge pursued an efficient writing system to record not speech but the flow of his own silent thoughts. Also discussing today’s optical character recognition software and the shorthand effect (when letters or words uncannily become illegible shapes, and non-linguistic shapes come to look like linguistic signs), this chapter culminates in a reading of the “signs” in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Milton's research activities in the 1630s involved book buying, book reading, note taking, and libraries. The book collections at Oxford and Cambridge, Sion and Eton Colleges, and the Kedermister Library contained resources essential to Milton's self‐study plan, but whether he had access to any of them is not clear. His meeting in early 1638 with Sir Henry Wotton, almost certainly brokered through the scholar John Hales, suggests the additional possibility that Milton became acquainted with Hales's private library, one of the best in the kingdom. A shelf‐list of it as it existed in 1621 has recently been found in the Eton College archives, and its discovery indicates how much remains to be examined regarding Milton's activities in the 1630s.

This study shows how, between 1661 and 1683, the culture of double-entry, mercantile accounting was central to Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s massive project of royal archive building in ancient régime France. Scholars have tended to see state archives as the products of learned and legal culture. The case of Colbert demonstrates that mercantile culture and commerce also made an essential contribution to archival development in the early modern period, as well as laying the foundation for state sponsored learning, science, industry, art, building, and administration. It illustrates how economic interest and financial management drove archive formation and organisation in the early modern era, correcting the dominant emphasis on techniques derived from scholarship.

This chapter focuses on Ralegh's geographical notebook to examine the practice of reading. It demonstrates how scholars directed the methods of these practices at their expanded variety of sources. It discusses the certainty of method, tacit politics, and tradition, and explains how geography served as a sort of problem solver. It also tackles Baconian science as an idealized vision of antiquarian reading practices.

This chapter argues that pilgrims to the Holy Land were largely responsible for redefining travel as an exercise in literate self-discipline. It situates travel writing about the Holy Land within devotional and intellectual traditions that date to late antiquity, but that found new force during the Middle Ages, with the striking spread and diversification of literacies.

This chapter assesses the problems faced by the English virtuosi: how to record and retrieve items of interest encountered in reading, conversation, lectures, observations, and experiments. The arrangement of excerpts from reading under subjects or categories developed during the sixteenth century literally into a commonplace, a ‘common-place’ book being a compendium of excerpts classified by the subjects they had in common. This ancestry raises the problem that virtuosi who decried the ‘bookish practices’ of sixteenth-century scholarship nonetheless used a method characteristic of it. Moreover, some virtuosi sometimes criticized common-placing as inhibiting to reading and destructive of memory. Hence the second problem: how reliance on note-taking came to displace reliance on memory.

Being a juror is hard work. Courts are increasingly implementing innovative techniques that have the potential to help jurors. This chapter focuses on general strategies for aiding jurors that can be implemented throughout trial, such as clarifying the legal instructions, modifying the trial structure, and allowing jurors to ask questions, take notes, and discuss the case prior to deliberation. It also presents a few novel possibilities for enhancing jurors’ factfinding and decisionmaking. The chapter concludes that many of these innovations are beneficial and that the future is promising, as courts continue to seek ways to improve jurors’ experience and their performance.

This chapter introduces St Gall, Johannes Rütiner, and his notebooks, the Commentationes. Sixteenth-century St Gall was a small Protestant town on the border of the Swiss Confederacy. Despite its moderate size, it was well known for the abbey in its midst as well as for the production of high-quality linen which was highly sought-after all over Europe. The chapter reconstructs Rütiner’s education in St Gall and Basle as well as his career as a small-scale linen trader and office-holder in his hometown. It then discusses Rütiner’s Commentationes as part of a broader trend in St Gall that saw numerous citizens, and many of Rütiner’s friends, take up writing chronicles around the time of the Reformation. At the same time, the chapter draws attention to the many distinctive features of the Commentationes and their resistance to any conventional categorization. Written in unpolished Latin, lacking chronological order and containing a plethora of unflattering stories about St Gall’s elite—and some of Rütiner’s closest friends—the Commentationes were intended as a private memory aid, not as a chronicle to be handed down to future generations.