Rowena Swanson

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Rowena Weiss Swanson (born 1928) is an American information scientist. In the 1950s and 1960s she worked for the US Patent Office and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, helping to channel funding to computer scientists, cyberneticians and philosophers such as Douglas Engelbart, Calvin Mooers, Marvin Minsky, Calvin Mooers, Heinz von Foerster, Gotthard Günther, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Gordon Pask, Warren McCulloch, William L. Kilmer, David Rothenberg and Max Black. In the 1970s she was Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Denver, before working for the United States Office of Personnel Management.

Contents

Early life and education

Rowena Weiss was born in Brooklyn on August 3, 1928, the daughter of Marmion Livingston Weiss (1895-1959) and Lenore Hartman (1897-1959). [1] Wallace H. Weiss (1931-2011) was a younger brother. [2] [3] She attended Calvin Coolidge High School, where in 1943 she reported for the school magazine, The Courier. [4] In 1949 she gained a Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Catholic University of America, [5] In 1948 she co-authored a paper with scientists at George Washington University School of Medicine‘s Department of Pharmacology, measuring absorption of the antibiotic para-aminosalicylic acid. [6] In 1953 she gained a JD from George Washington University. [5]

Defense career

In 1954 Weiss helped to write up a 1951 Geological Survey investigation of the Phosphoria Formation undertaken on behalf of the US Atomic Energy Commission. [7] By 1956 she was working as Acquisitions Officer for the ASTIA Reference Center at the Library of Congress. [8]

At some point in the 1950s she took on the surname Swanson, presumably as the result of marriage. [9] She joined the Office of Research and Development at the US Patent Office, becoming interested in information retrieval there. [10]

Swanson was Project Supervisor at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) in the early 1960s, working with Harold Wooster. There, from 1959 onwards, [11] she ensured the funding of Douglas C. Englebart's research into human-machine collaboration at the Stanford Research Institute, [12] [13] apparently surreptitiously rescuing Englebart's application from the 'rejection' pile to put it in the 'accepted for final review' pile. [14] Swanson helped Englebert turn his 1962 SRI report, 'Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework', into a book chapter in 1963. [11] She also gave editorial assistance to the ASOFR-funded work of Calvin Mooers. [15] Throughout the 1960s Swanson continued to organize funding for computer scientists and cybernetic researchers. She helped fund Marvin Minsky, [16] and was a friend and sponsor for Heinz von Foerster at the Biological Computer Laboratory. [17] She also organized funding for the work of Gotthard Günther and Ernst von Glasersfeld. [18] Ernst von Glasersfeld recalled her sponsoring his own research alongside that of Gordon Pask, Warren McCulloch, Max Black and David Rothenberg, and introducing these disparate researchers to each other. [19]

In 1966 she was Acting Director of the Directorate of Information Sciences at the AFOSR, as Harold Wooster took up the post of Director previously held by Thomas K. Burgess. [20] By 1967 she was a Project Scientist under Wooster, along with Eliot Sohmer. [21] Another colleague was Lea M. Bohnert. [22]

Addressing a 1970 workshop for military librarians, Frank Kurt Cylke paid tribute to the work of Wooster and Swanson at AFOSR: "Of course, Harold Wooster and Rowena Swanson are no longer concentrating their efforts upon the theoretical and practical problems that are present. Margrett Zenich, however, is still fighting the good fight." [23] Gordon Pask, writing in 1973, acknowledged the patronage of the AFOSR's European office and emphasised the particular importance of Swanson's influence there:

In common with others in this field, we owe a special debt to Prof. Rowena Swanson who insisted throughout the formative years from 1961 to 1967, when she served in that organisation [AFOSR], upon the proper communication and integration of ongoing research. [24]

Academic librarianship

By 1968 Swanson had become Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Denver's Graduate School of Librarianship. [25] [26]

Swanson served as Technical Program Chairman for the American Society for Information Science (ASIS), [27] and was a regular contributor to the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). In 1975 her paper 'Performing Evaluation Studies in Information Science' won the Best JASIST Paper Award. [28]

In 1979 she retired from the University of Denver to become a "consulting resources specialist for information systems design at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management". [29]

Works

Related Research Articles

Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heinz von Foerster</span> Austrian-American scientist and cybernetician (1911–2002)

Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian-American scientist combining physics and philosophy, and widely attributed as the originator of second-order cybernetics. He was twice a Guggenheim fellow and also was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980. He is well known for his 1960 Doomsday equation formula published in Science predicting future population growth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Information science</span> Academic field concerned with collection and analysis of information

Information science is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information. Practitioners within and outside the field study the application and the usage of knowledge in organizations in addition to the interaction between people, organizations, and any existing information systems with the aim of creating, replacing, improving, or understanding the information systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Air Force Research Laboratory</span> Scientific research organization for the US Air Force and US Space Force

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The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is a nonprofit membership organization for information professionals that sponsors an annual conference as well as several serial publications, including the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). The organization provides administration and communications support for its various divisions, known as special-interest groups or SIGs; provides administration for geographically defined chapters; connects job seekers with potential employers; and provides organizational support for continuing education programs for information professionals.

Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the reflexive practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It is cybernetics where "the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western science". Second-order cybernetics was developed between the late 1960s and mid 1970s by Heinz von Foerster and others, with key inspiration coming from Margaret Mead. Foerster referred to it as "the control of control and the communication of communication" and differentiated first-order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observed systems" and second-order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observing systems".

Bibliographic coupling, like co-citation, is a similarity measure that uses citation analysis to establish a similarity relationship between documents. Bibliographic coupling occurs when two works reference a common third work in their bibliographies. It is an indication that a probability exists that the two works treat a related subject matter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gordon Pask</span> British cybernetician, educational theorist, and computer scientist (1928–1996)

Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask was a British cybernetician, inventor and polymath who made multiple contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, educational technology, applied epistemology, chemical computing, architecture, and systems art. During his life, he gained three doctorate degrees. He was an avid writer, with more than two hundred and fifty publications which included a variety of journal articles, books, periodicals, patents, and technical reports. He worked as an academic and researcher for a variety of educational settings, research institutes, and private stakeholders including but not limited to the University of Illinois, Concordia University, the Open University, Brunel University and the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He is known for the development of conversation theory.

Ranulph Glanville was an Anglo-Irish cybernetician and design theorist. He was a founding vice-president of the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences (2006–2009) and president of the American Society for Cybernetics (2009–2014).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don R. Swanson</span> American computer scientist (1924–2012)

Don R. Swanson was an American information scientist, most known for his work in literature-based discovery in the biomedical domain. His particular method has been used as a model for further work, and is often referred to as Swanson linking. He was an investigator in the Arrowsmith System project, which seeks to determine meaningful links between Medline articles to identify previously undiscovered public knowledge. He had been professor emeritus of the University of Chicago since 1996, and remained active in a post-retirement appointment until his health began to decline in 2009.

Frederica Darema is a Greek American physicist. She proposed the SPMD programming model in 1984 and Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) in 2000. She was elected IEEE Fellow in 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cybernetics</span> Transdisciplinary field concerned with regulatory and purposive systems

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mortimer Taube</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Networking and Information Technology Research and Development</span> NiTRD

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References

  1. ↑ Who's Who In The West. Marquis Who’s Who. 1976. ISBN   0-8379-0915-5.
  2. ↑ "Wallace H. Weiss". The Washington Post. November 13, 2011.
  3. ↑ "Wallace Weiss Obituary". legacy.com.
  4. ↑ "Editorial Staff". The Coolidge Courier: 2. 1943.
  5. 1 2 "Degrees Conferred". The George Washington University Bulletin: 434. 1954.
  6. ↑ E. Leong Way; Paul K. Smith; Donald L. Howie; Rollan Swanson (July 1948). "The absorption, distribution, excretion and fate of para-aminosalicylic acid". Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. 93 (3): 368–382. PMID   18882143.
  7. ↑ Peterson, James Aurl. Stratigraphic sections of the Phosphoria Formation in Montana, 1951.
  8. ↑ Cruft Laboratory, Harvard University (1956). Progress Report No. 39 (PDF) (Technical report). AD-93360.
  9. ↑ It is unclear whom Weiss married. The pharmacologist Rollan Swanson had been a collaborator on her 1948 paper. The information scientist Don R. Swanson was a contemporary with similar interests.
  10. ↑ "Patent Office Describes Progress in Retrieval Research". Scientific Information Notes. August 1959.
  11. 1 2 Englebart, Douglas (1986). "Workstation History and The Augmented Knowledge Workshop". Proceedings of the ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations. New York: ACM Press. pp. 87–100.
  12. ↑ Mitchell, William. "The Genesis of NASA RECON".
  13. ↑ "ASOFR Provides Early Support for Principal Architect of Computer Revolution" (PDF). Air Force Research Laboratory Research. May–Jun 1999.
  14. ↑ Air Force Research Laboratory History Program (December 21, 2005). ""Breakthrough" Technologies Developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory and its Predecessors" (PDF). p. 81-83.
  15. ↑ Mooers, Calvin (October 1962). Wanted: A Reactive Typewriter (PDF) (Technical report). Zator Company. p. iv. AFOSR-2711.
  16. ↑ Minsky, Marvin (1967). "Preface". Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines (PDF). Prentice-Hall. p. xii.
  17. ↑ Paul Weston; Jan Müggenburg; James Andrew Hutchinson. "Kybernetik in Urbana". pp. 126–139.
  18. ↑ "Interview mit Heinz von Foerster" (PDF).
  19. ↑ von Glasersfeld, Ernst (2001). "Remembering Gordon Pask". Kybernetes. 30 (7/8): 970. doi:10.1108/03684920110396855. I first heard about Gordon Pask in the early 1960s when I received a contract from the US Air Force to do research in computational linguistics. Rowena Swanson, who monitored our team, operated on the wonderful principle that researchers she looked after should get to know each other in order to exchange ideas and to break down disciplinary enclosures. It took me quite some time to believe that there was no hidden agenda. It just did not seem plausible that military organisation should finance Warren McCulloch's modelling of neural networks, Heinz Von Foerster's efforts to establish a constructivist epistemology, Max Black's studies of the logic of semantics, David Rothenberg's quest for unifying principles in the perception of musical patterns, my own struggles with the structure of language, and Gordon Pask's revolutionary ideas about intellectual interaction between teachers, students, and human agents in general.
  20. ↑ Swanson, Rowena (1966). "Information Sciences, 1965" (PDF).
  21. ↑ Air Force Office of Scientific Research (1967). "AFOSR Research: The Current Research Program, and a Summary of Research Accomplishments" (PDF).
  22. ↑ Bohnert, Lea M. (1967). "Retrieval of Technical Documents" (PDF).
  23. ↑ "14th Military Librarians Workshop" (PDF). Air Force Otfice of Scientific Research. 1970.
  24. ↑ Pask, Gordon (1973). Conversation, Cognition and Learning: A Cybernetic Theory and Methodology (PDF). Elsevier.
  25. ↑ University of Denver, Graduate School of Librarianship (1968). Catalog. p. 13.
  26. ↑ "Information Science vis-a-vis Library School Curricula". Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science: x, 147.
  27. ↑ "News From the Field". College & Research Libraries News. 32 (8). 1971.
  28. ↑ "Best JASIST Paper Award".
  29. ↑ "ASIS News". Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science. 6: 35. 1979.
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