The cybernetics thought collective project: Using computational methods to reveal intellectual context in archival material

This paper discusses “The Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project,” a collaborative effort among four institutions that maintain archival records vital to the exploration of cybernetic history — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the American Philosophical Society, the British Library, and MIT. With recent grant funding from the NEH, the multi-institutional team is developing a prototype web-portal and analysis-engine to provide access to archival material related to the development of the field of cybernetics, which influenced the development of modern computing and provided a common language to articulate similar questions about behavior across disciplines — regardless of whether the subject of study was animal, machine, or social group. The project is also enabling the digitization of the personal archives of four founders of cybernetics — Heinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, Warren S. McCulloch, and Norbert Wiener. Using computational methods based on advanced machine-learning algorithms to yield network and entity relationships maps from the digitized texts, this project seeks to create access to archival material that enables humanities scholars to better understand the development of cybernetic ideas and to enable scientists and engineers to reuse and access cybernetic data.