CfP: Intellectual Furniture. A (Pre-)History of Large Language Models

International Workshop, University of Basel, 10.–11. September 2026

In 1696, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz noted, that we are in need of tools, bodily aids or mentally aids, to think with. He not only phrased his idea in reference to Francis Bacon's New Organon, but also, presumably, with his scrinium litterarum in mind (or, even maybe directly interacting with it), his tailor-made cabinet which he mobilised to organise, reshuffle, and arrange his ideas on slips of paper. This cabinet or tool of thinking, though lost in Hanover during the turmoil of WWII, may serve as the historical starting point to examine the long history of devices in which language is organized and operationalized in its materiality to serve as a tool of thinking due to specific concepts of order and connection, be it on moveable slips, be it on standardised pages or cards, be it on tiny notes or kept in files, be it clipped to a rod or be it stored in different drawers or hidden chambers, which are only opened by triggering a subtle mechanism. The notes and language particles in these devices are deposited by scholars or literary authors at certain positions in order to be retrieved later for a regular query, a special question or to encounter it again by chance. It is due to the specific design and its constellation of notes that these devices offer a certain mode of artificial intelligence in an analogue sense. The devices are designed for fostering ingenuity while they also act as externalised memories for their users. Like personal databases and huge individual language models in the analogue age they are supposed to provide answers to their users' inquiries – just as Google's search bar or ChatBots' prompt fields of the presence wait for the authors to answer their questions and develop their lines of thought in close communication between device and user.



With a retrospective look on the long media history of artificial intelligence focussing on scholars/literary authors and their writing aids, we want to sound out the differences and also the similarities between historical ways of interacting with »intelligent« devices and the strategies of current interactions with AI models. While taking a look at the foundations of (electronic) computability as well as at varying constellations in which an actor, using specific rules and strategies, enters into an intellectual dialogue with a device in order to jointly arrive at new thoughts, the workshop indulges in different genealogies of devices to think with while asking for case studies, scenarios, histories and analytical accounts of intellectual furniture from the early modern period to the presence in order to discuss different types of »large language models« before and within the era of today's AI models.



What does it mean to communicate with an assemblage of (mainly) wood and paper in the age before electricity and in which ways is intelligence implemented in the device? On the conceptual, historiographical level we are interested in how we can conceive and describe the ways of interacting between author and the intellectual furniture as a dialogue partner while finding new constellations of knowledge? Which theoretical approaches prove to be most promising to analyze the (mechanical) intelligence built into the devices? What concepts of agency help to scrutinize the emergence of inspiration during the human-machine-interaction?



The workshop shall bring together scholars and historians of note-taking and media devices (such as slip boxes, card catalogs, filing systems and alike) with curators and art historians with an expertise in writing desks and intellectual furniture of all kind in order to carve out the main lines and avenues of the precursors of today's large language models.



We kindly invite for proposals (one pdf page) with an abstract and contact details to be submitted to Yannick Nepomuk Fritz (yannick.fritz@unibas.ch) by April 3, 2026. Notification of acceptance will be given by April 24, 2026.

Travel costs and accommodation for invited speakers can be covered.