Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of History of Ideas, Stockholm University

Hybrid event.
Zoom: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65802739142 External link, opens in new window.

ABSTRACT:
We live in an era when information technologies develop faster than ever before and worries about their impact are omnipresent. Among the tech optimists, however, the main lesson learned from history seems to be that ‘people have always worried’, thus suggesting that worries always (even now) are exaggerated, misdirected, and conservative. But this assumption can be challenged if delving deep into the historical periods when other information technologies first got their ‘big break’.

In this talk, I will present the results of a five-year research project devoted to the eighteenth-century ‘Dictionary craze’. From the late seventeenth century onwards, alphabetically-organized reference-works multiplied on European book markets to such a degree that contemporaries called it a craze, mania, or epidemic. While some believed that dictionaries would bring about a revolution in learning, others saw them as a threat to everything that learning stood for. In hindsight, it is tempting to interpret such expressions of enthusiasm and worry as exaggerated. But if moving closer to eighteenth-century experiences, it becomes clear that dictionaries played a very different role in learning and culture during their ‘big break’, compared to how we see and use them in the twenty-first century.