The Cybernetics Thought Collective: Machine-Generated Data Using Computational Methods

Bethany G Anderson

doi:10.5334/johd.19

Abstract

This dataset comprises machine-generated data from the research records and personal archives of four founding members of the transdisciplinary field of cybernetics—W. Ross Ashby, Warren S. McCulloch, Heinz von Foerster, and Norbert Wiener. These archives (or, fonds) are held by the British Library, the American Philosophical Society, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and MIT, respectively. The data were created for “The Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project” (2017–2019), a pilot project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Using computational methods and tools—machine learning, named entity recognition, and natural language processing—on digitized archival records, the data were generated to enhance archival access in three distinct but interrelated ways: as archival metadata for the digitized records, as reusable data to facilitate digital scholarly analyses, and as the basis for a series of test visualizations. The data represent entities associated with cybernetic concepts and the main actors attached to the cybernetics movement and the exchange of its ideas. The dataset is stored along with the digitized records in the University of Illinois (U of I) Library’s multi-tiered repository, a replicated preservation service based on PREMIS (Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies). Reuse potential for this dataset includes historical/archival, linguistic, and artistic analyses of the data to examine connections between the cybernetic entities. <strong>Funding statement:</strong> “The Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project” (NEH PW-253912-17), was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program (US).

Highlights

Context Cybernetics was a transdisciplinary scientific movement in the mid-twentieth century that emerged from the Macy Conferences on “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems” (1946– 1953), as well as the publication of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine [34]
Discussions radiating from the Macy Conferences evolved into correspondence networks, publications, and the establishment of centers for systems and cybernetics
The project was led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library in collaboration with the American Philosophical Society, the British Library, and the MIT Distinctive Collections

Summary

DATA PAPER

The Cybernetics Thought Collective: Machine-Generated Data Using Computational Methods. The dataset includes file-level metadata, some of which is human created (e.g., level of description and title), and some of which is collection-level metadata that applies to all digital objects in the same fonds (e.g., scope and contents, parent collection, collection identifier), and provides original archival context for the machine-generated data (e.g., machine-extracted feature, cybernetic classification, certainty). A selection of the data was used to create test visualizations, which are available on the project site Sampling strategy This pilot project aimed to produce a proof-of-concept machine learning, named entity recognition, and natural language processing pipeline for meta/data generation and classification of archival records; through this process, a representative sample of documents that illustrate prominent cybernetic concepts and consist of letters between von Foerster, Ashby, McCulloch, Wiener, and other known cyberneticians were selected from across the four fonds. It is important to find ways to make them mutually discoverable in archival access systems

Format names and versions CSV

Repository name University of Illinois Digital Collections repository