Life
Swanson was born in Los Angeles on October 10, 1924, the son of Harry Windfield and Grace Clara (Sandstrom) Swanson. He served with the United States Navy Reserve from 1942 to 1926, and received his B.S. in Physics at California Institute of Technology, Caltech, Pasadena, California in 1945. He gained his M.A from Rice University, Rice Institute, Houston, Texas, two years later, and then a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1952. From 1952 to 1954 Swanson worked as a computer systems analyst at Hughes Aircraft Company Research and Development Laboratories in Culver City, California. In 1955 had joined Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. Initially working as a research scientist, by 1959 he was manager of the Synthetic Intelligence Dept. at Ramo-Wooldridge. There he led a project contracted to the Council on Library Resources, with Noam Chomsky and Paul L. Garvin as linguistic advisors, to investigate machine indexing of 'a small experimental library of scientific text (ca. 300,000 words)'. Swanson collaborated further with Garvin on Russian-English machine translation, considering problems of polysemy, in work funded by the Rome Air Development Center. In December 1959 he attended the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, speaking on 'Engineering Aspects' in a symposium on the uses of data processing equipment in anthropology. By 1961 he was a member of the National Science Foundation's Science Information Council. In 1963 Swanson joined the University of Chicago as a professor in the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, Graduate School of Library Science. He also served as dean of the graduate school from 1963 to 1972, from 1977 to 1979 and again from 1987 to 1989. From 1972 to 1976 he was a research fellow at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. In the 1980s Swanson pioneered literature-based discovery in the biomedical domain, building the Arrowsmith System around a discovery method that has since become known as Swanson linking. He hypothesized that the combination of two separately published results indicating an A-B relationship and a B-C relationship are evidence of an unknown or unexplored A-C relationship. He used this to propose fish oil as a treatment for Raynaud syndrome, due to their shared relationship with blood viscosity. From 1992 to 1996 Swanson was professor of the biosciences collection division and the humanities division at Chicago. In 1996 he became professor emeritus. In 2000, Swanson was awarded the Award of Merit - Association for Information Science and Technology, the highest honor of the society, for his "lifetime achievements in research and scholarship."Swanson, Don Richard. 2001. “ASIST Award of Merit Acceptance Speech on the Fragmentation of Knowledge, the Connection Explosion, and Assembling Other People’s Ideas.” ''Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology'' 27 (3): 12–14.Works
* * * * * * * * (with Paul L. Garvin and Jules Mersel) * * (with Christine Montgomery) * * * * * * (ed. with Abraham Bookstein) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (with Neil R. Smalheiser) * (with Neil R. Smalheiser) * * (with Neil R. Smalheiser) * (with Neil R. Smalheiser and A. Bookstein) * (with Neil R. Smalheiser and Vetle I. Torvik)References
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