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Kathryn Schwartz, Book Historian of the Modern Middle East
Ann Blair, Malika Zeghal
Journal:

Review of Middle East Studies / Volume 57 / Issue 2 / December 2023

Published online by Cambridge University Press:

13 March 2025, pp. 202-209

Print publication:

December 2023
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This article presents the contributions of Dr. Kathryn Schwartz (1984-2022), book historian of the modern Middle East. Her study of the origins and impact of the printing press in late Ottoman Egypt has challenged some long-standing assumptions in the historiography. She has also put into question the long-held belief that Ottomans banned printing. More broadly, her work has challenged Eurocentric approaches to this topic and has innovated by combining material and intellectual history.

4 - Cognitive Science
from II - The Never-Ending Debate
Harry van der Hulst, University of Connecticut
Book:

A Mind for Language

Published online:

13 October 2023

Print publication:

21 September 2023, pp 89-129
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Summary

Chapter 4 describes the field of cognitive science, which is the arena where all those who study “intelligent systems” (“minds“) get together to compare notes. A shared idea is that the mind can be understood as an information-processing computational system. We will see how during the 1960s renewed interest in the mind from different academic disciplines emerged as a reaction to the denial of the mind of an approach to psychology called behaviorism. We then discuss the various strands of thinking in a variety of different fields that led to this “cognitive revolution.” We learn that there are fundamental, opposing views in this field that are relevant to the nature–nurture debate. Despite differences, a general understanding within cognitive science is that the mind can be studied at different levels of abstractness and from different angles which to some extent compete but also complement each other.

Theories and Practices of Cryptology
Katherine Ellison
Published online:

24 November 2022

Print publication:

08 December 2022
- Element
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Cryptology of the long eighteenth century became an explicit discipline of secrecy. Theorized in pedagogical texts that reached wide audiences, multimodal methods of secret writing during the period in England promoted algorithmic literacy, introducing reading practices like discernment, separation, recombination, and pattern recognition. In composition, secret writing manipulated materials and inspired new technologies in instrumentation, computation, word processing, and storage. Cryptology also revealed the visual habits of print and the observational consequences of increasing standardization in writing, challenging the relationship between print and script. Secret writing served not only military strategists and politicians; it gained popularity with everyday readers as a pleasurable cognitive activity for personal improvement and as an alternative way of thinking about secrecy and literacy.