On Monday Dec, 14, at 13.00 – 14
Followed with coffee at 14-14.30 (register for coffee by 4.12, via this link).
Location: Athena 302, Siltavuorenpenger 3 A, 00170 Helsinki, University of Helsinki,
The talk will be streamed https://video.helsinki.fi/unitube/live-stream.html?room=l38
Abstract: The mass establishment of new information technologies has repeatedly reshaped ideals and practices of reading, studying, learning, and knowing throughout history. This presentation asks what contemporary debates about generative AI in higher education can learn from eighteenth-century responses to the rapid proliferation of alphabetically organized reference works: dictionaries and encyclopedias. Drawing on reviews and discussions in the European learned press, it examines a recurring tension in the history of knowledge: the promise and peril of intellectual shortcuts. Eighteenth-century dictionaries offered readers unprecedented access to condensed, searchable information, promising to make temporary knowing faster, easier, and more widely accessible. Critics, however, feared that such tools would encourage superficial learning, weaken memory and intellectual discipline, and enable users to acquire answers without the labor required for genuine understanding. Similar concerns have resurfaced around generative AI. Rather than treating these parallels as evidence that technological anxieties simply repeat themselves, the presentation argues that the comparison illuminates how new information technologies renegotiate what counts as legitimate intellectual labor. Our digital present makes us unusually well placed to recognize what was at stake in eighteenth-century debates; conversely, those debates reveal that the boundary between useful assistance and problematic shortcut has always been historically contingent and contested.
Linn Holmberg works as an Associate Professor of History of Ideas at Stockholm University. Her current project, titled Dictionary Craze: Transforming Knowledge across Early Modern Europe, explores the process when the alphabetically-organized reference work was established on European book markets, and the intellectual, practical, and emotional consequences that followed in its trail. She is particularly interested in how new media like dictionaries and periodicals contributed to changing behaviors, attitudes, and emotions relating to knowledge, know-how, and learning. She is a collaborator on an interdisciplinary project UnMaking Knowledge (see below). Read more about Linn Holmberg: https://www.su.se/english/profiles/l/lihol
This event is organised by two research projects exploring knowledge in higher education in Finland:
- (Un)Making Knowledge – Students’ relationship with knowledge from Modernity to AI, at Tampere University, funded by Kone Foundation (2025-2029): https://projects.tuni.fi/un-making-knowledge/
- Tracing Knowledge – Universities and the Risk of Empty Education, at the University of Helsinki and University of Jyväskylä, funded by the Research Council of Finland (2026–2030): www.tracingknowledge.fi
You are warmly welcome to join interdisciplinary discussions on knowledge!
More information from
Research professor Johanna Annala
johanna.s.annala@jyu.fi, tel. 050 466 8141