Ross started writing a journal in May 1928, when he was a 24 year old medical student
at Barts Hospital in London. In it he
recorded his thoughts, theories, and goals that would eventually bring
him recognition as a pioneer in the fields of cybernetics and systems
theory. By the time Ross died in November 1972, after keeping his journal for 44 years, it had 7,189 pages, in 25 volumes.
In their condolence letters to Rosebud, Stafford Beer wrote "Look after Ross's papers. I
have no idea what should be done with them, but they are very precious." and Gordon Pask echoed the same concern, writing "Please keep everything he wrote.".
For the next 30 years, only members of his family
had access to his journals.
Eventually, the family digitized his journals, papers, and correspondence, and in
January 2003, gave all his archive material to the British Library, in London. A year later, in March 2004, on the last day of the W. Ross Ashby Centenary Conference, they announced their intention to make his journal available on the Internet.
Since 2008, the digitally restored images of
all 7,189 pages and 1,600 index cards have been
available on this website in various views, with extensive cross-linking that is based on Ross's original index.
To start browsing Ross's journal, you can try any of the following:
Scan through the 678 primary keywords in the alphabetical Index.
Explore the 830 entries in 14½ different subject categories in the Other Index.
If you are looking for journal entries around a particular date, use the
Timeline.
You could read the 2,300 transcribed journal entry
Summaries.
Or throw caution to the wind, and jump to a
Random page.
The rest of this page describes the different views, what they are good for, and how to use them.
Multiple Views
Because Ross wrote his journal sequentially in notebooks, numbered the pages, and indexed the contents, it's been possible to write XSL transformations that generate different views of the information in the journal and indexes. There are ten different views. They are summarized in the following table:
Contains thumbnail images of all journal pages that are indexed for each particular keyword. The thumbnails are sorted chronologically and are grouped by year.
Chronologically lists all dated journal pages with the places where Ross was at the time.
Together, these densely interlinked views make it easy to browse purposefully through Ross's journal and indexes.
Bookshelf View
This view shows the spines and covers of all 25 volumes.
It's as if you're visiting Ross and Rosebud at "Westons", the home that they lovingly created from an old village school in Tockington, near Bristol, England, and you're standing in front of the journals, which are on a bookshelf in the Bell Room. Ross is nearby, playing the clarinet, while Rosebud makes a pot of tea, and slowly, as you try to decide which volume to open first, you run a fingertip across the spines of the journals and notice their surprisingly coarse textures.
But the moment that you reach out and select a volume, you're sucked backwards out of the Bell Room, across the hypnopompic psycho-reality event horizon, and into cyberspace — where you're immediately confronted by the aesthetically distressing Volume View (go on, try it!;-).
Volume View
This view contains thumbnail images of all pages in a volume. Above each image are any summaries that Ross wrote, any keywords that he indexed the pages for, and any entries in his other index that reference the pages.
Welcome! You're inside an abstraction of the meticulous mind-space of Ross Ashby. As your eyes dart from page to page, across summaries, keywords, and diagrams, your mind must re-adjust to the relentless raster of images, color saturation, and cognitive stimulation that is lighting up every isomorphic corner of your cerebral cortex. By skim-reading the summaries and keywords in this view, you can fast-forward, fast-backward, or clicksplore by following links through the network that is Ross-mindspace-time of over 44 years of his thoughts and ideas. Everything that might interest you in this view is clickable, and will jump you to the clicked entity in another view.
Yellow and green backgrounds convey whether summaries and keywords are associated with the left or right page.
Clicking on a thumbnail takes you to that page in the journal.
Clicking on a blue Summary takes you to that summary on the Summaries page.
Clicking on a blue keyword takes you to that keyword's entry in the index.
Clicking on a blue category takes you to that entry number in the relevant category in the other index.
Index Page
Ross's 860-card alphabetical index has been turned into a single 1 MB page. This makes it possible to search the entire index (all primary and secondary index terms) by pressing Control-F in your browser.
This page contains two views: A keyword cloud and the alphabetically sorted index entries. To illustrate the different views, the following sample screenshots focus on the keyword Entropy.
Keyword Cloud View
At the top of the index page, the Keyword Cloud contains all 678 keywords.
The size of each keyword reflects how many page references it has. Hovering the mouse pointer over a keyword displays the exact number.
Clicking on a keyword jumps you, within the Index Page, down to that keyword's index entry.
Clicking on a blue letter jumps you, within the Index Page, to the top of the cloud.
Clicking on one of the filtering links (All | 600 | 400 | 300 | 200 | 100 | 50) allows you to control how many keywords are displayed in the cloud.
Keyword Index View
Every keyword has an entry in the index that contains the complete transcription of the index cards.
This is the core of the index. From here, you have direct access to all related journal pages, references, and other views.
Page numbers are shown in blue if you haven't visited them recently. Any pages that you have already viewed are shown in red if they are still in your browser's cache. Hovering the mouse pointer over a page number displays the year that Ross wrote that page. Clicking on the page number displays the image of that Journal Page. Where Ross specified page ranges, for example 1234-36, they are shown as a set of page numbers { 1234 1235 1236 }, which has advantages when the pages that you have already looked at are shown in red.
References to publications are shown in gold. Hovering the mouse pointer over a golden link displays the author, title, and publication details. Clicking on a reference link takes you to the complete list of references, which is available sorted both numerically and alphabetically by author.
Cross-references to other index keywords are shown in green. Clicking on a green keyword takes you to that keyword's entry on the Index Page... unless it was one of the early cards that Ross reused or removed. These dead links have not been deleted, since their presence provides insight into index keywords that Ross once used, but later abandoned.
Terms or names that are shown in grey link to Wikipedia articles. These links have hover text that can help to disambiguate between different people or possible interpretations of terms.
Each index entry also has links to the Cards and Thumbs views for that keyword, and a link that takes you back up, within the Index Page, to the Keyword Cloud.
Keep in mind that Ross didn't index the contents of every page, so there are inevitably some journal entries that can only be found by luck or by systematically reading every page in a time period of interest.
Keyword Card View
In this view, images of the original index cards for a particular keyword are displayed with the transcription under them, on which the digital index and all keyword links are based.
Above the card, the Previous and Next links take you to this same view for the alphabetically preceding or following keywords.
There are also links to the Keyword Thumbs view and the Keyword Index entry for this keyword, and a link back to the Keyword Cloud.
The transcription under the card is identical to the entry in the Keyword Index view, and the links behave in the same way.
This view is useful for checking index text that has been transcribed in [square brackets] because either we couldn't read it properly or we couldn't type it accurately.
If you notice an error in the transcription of an index card, please click the 'Send Index Error Feedback' link for that card to email us, so that we can correct it.
Keyword Thumbs View
This view contains thumbnail images of all the pages that were indexed for a particular keyword. It's ideal for investigating Ross's work one keyword at-a-time. The images are sorted chronologically, and are grouped by year. It reveals how themes weave through the journal across time. You can use this view to see when Ross first started working on a particular topic, and to identify the years in which he was more or less actively working on it.
More importantly, compared to the entries in the alphabetical Index view, this view shows which other keywords are associated with each page (and any summaries), which creates a semantic cluster that gives a richer impression of the contents of the written page.
Yellow and green backgrounds convey whether keywords are associated with the left or right page.
The primary keyword (Entropy) is shown in red, to make it easier to find the corresponding second level entries.
Listed above each thumbnail in blue are all the other primary keywords that each page was indexed for.
Clicking on a keyword takes you to that keyword's entry on the Index Page.
If Ross wrote a summary, it appears above any keywords. Clicking on the blue Summary link takes you to that summary on the Summaries page.
If there is an editorial note, you can display the text by hovering your mouse over the red box.
Clicking on a thumbnail takes you to the image of that journal page.
Above each year, the Previous and Next links take you to this same view for the alphabetically preceding or following keywords.
There are also links to the Keyword Card view and the Keyword Index entry for this keyword, and a link back to the Keyword Cloud.
Journal View
This view contains the images of Ross's journal pages. This is the view that you arrive in if you click any page number link on this web site.
After the image of the journal page has finished loading, it is resized to fit the width of your browser's window.
Across the very top of the page are a row of links that have pop-up hints to clarify their purpose.
To change the zoom level of the page view, either click on the top of the journal page image (when a zoom-graphic is faded in), or use the drop-down list to select between fitting 1-page or 2-pages to the width of the window, or displaying the page at 100% resolution (Normal = 1900 pixels wide).
If you have an ultra-high-definition screen and a fast internet connection, you can use the drop-down to switch between normal resolution images (1900 pixels wide with enhanced contrast) and ultra-high-definition images (4k pixels wide with the original color balance and contrast).
To jump to a particular page, select the page-jump box, replace the current page number (3368) with the page number that you want, and press Enter.
For more screen space, click the Remove Frames link to get rid of the navigation frame. You can get the navigation frame back again by clicking any Home link.
The yellow and green blocks contain the following information about the left and right hand pages:
The page number
The volume number (which links to the appropriate Volume View)
If known, the exact date that Ross wrote the page, otherwise the year. Clicking on it takes you to that date in the Timeline View
If known, the place where Ross was when he wrote the page.
If Ross wrote one or more summaries on the page, they appear above any keywords. Clicking on a blue Summary link takes you to that summary on the Summaries page.
If the pages were indexed, the index terms are listed for each page. Click on a blue keyword to view that keyword's entry in the index.
Together, the summaries and keywords are useful if you are quickly flipping through the journal pages, because they tend to provide a sufficient summary of the pages' contents to decide whether you actually want to read the hand-written text, or whether you want to flip more pages in search of entries that are closer to your areas of interest. However, if you find that you're flipping many pages and only reading the generated text without reading Ross's writing, it'll be more efficient if you use the Volume view. In this example, clicking the blue Volume 14 link will display the volume as thumbnail images and jump to the thumbnail of the current journal page.
When your mouse pointer is on the left or right page margin, a page-turn graphic is faded in. Click it to turn to the previous or next page.
Sumaries View
In July 1941, Ross decided to write a summary at the end of each journal entry. This view contains over 2,300 summaries of his journal entries. The summary text also appears above the appropriate thumbnails and journal pages.
This view offers the most condensed summary of Ross's work. If you are interested in particular keywords, it's worth pressing Control-F to search the summaries for entries that might not be covered by the alphabetical index.
Clicking on a page number takes you to that page.
Clicking on a date takes you to that date in the timeline view.
From 1948, Ross also marked the end of each journal entry with a distinctive doodle.
This makes it easier to see where one entry ends and the next begins.
Other Index View
This 830-card index is divided into different subject categories. Click on a category to view all the entries in the category. Category 7 shows that Ross wanted to write a book about the psychiatric applications of cybernetics.
The entries generally consist of one sentence and a page reference. All page references link to the appropriate page images, and the entry's text is included above the referenced pages. For entries that reference more than one page, the links included above the pages mean that these related pages are just one click away from each other.
Timeline View
This view lists all dated journal pages. It's useful if you want to find pages that were written on or around a particular date. If known, the place is also listed where Ross was when he wrote the page, which makes this the best view for seeing where Ross was and when.
If you've read all the way down to here without giving up, you'll probably want to take a look at the alphabetical Index next.
