The Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project
A
planning and pilot project to establish a collaborative digital archive for
sources related to the cybernetics movement of the mid-late 20th century, derived from collections held by the American Philosophical Society, the
British Library, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archives, and the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne Archives.
The proposed Foundations project seeks to build
collaborative relationships between the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, American Philosophical Society, British Library, and MIT
Institute Archives & Special Collections, to digitize and enhance access to
cybernetics archives, and to assess the potential of advanced machine-learning
methods to enhance their access and use. Specific work undertaken will include
(1) selective digitization of archival material that exposes research networks
of communication and thought and idea exchange; (2) creation and remediation of
metadata; (3) preservation and basic access through established systems; and
(4) initial testing and assessment of annotation, entity extraction, and
network analysis tools in a prototype platform. We believe these approaches can
enhance access not only to cybernetics material, but any large corpus of
unstructured textual documents, and NEH support will help us explore these
nascent possibilities.