deodands

Guide to online Turing archives

A brief guide to the major web resources of unpublished material by Turing (ie scans or text of key works) in general, not just morphogenesis.

As usual, Andrew Hodges has the authoritative list of sources, but there are two large sites with similar names but different purposes, and enough other sites to make it all rather confusing.

Primary material by Turing

The Turing Digital Archive

This site, www.turingarchive.org.uk, (with which I have some association) only has the pilot project live at the moment. However the project has scanned essentially all of the material in the King's College Archive, and a full site with most of this available should, I fervently hope, be online during Summer 2003. By construction, it has many of the personal letters that Sara Turing and Andrew Hodges drew on for their biographies, many pages of working notes on morphogenesis (which my site is mainly about) and a miscellanea of other things. It is less strong on documents from the history of computing, though there are some gems.

It is being constructed thanks to a grant from Elsevier to an informal consortium administered by King's College and using the skills of the King's archivist and a group at Southampton University. In the longer term I'd like to see this site expand a little, particularly to include the primary material currently held at Manchester.

The Turing Archive for the History of Computing

This site, www.alanturing.net, is an archive of more general ambition, covering a range of documents from the early history of computing. The site consists mainly of documents scanned (looks like from photocopies) from the UK Public Record Office. From a Turing perspective it is useful on the NPL years, and has a copy of the report on the Colossus. The site was created by Jack Copeland and his team in the Turing Project, which

exists to develop and apply the ideas of the mathematical logician Alan Turing ... Project members are currently engaged in research on Turing's Neural Network Architectures, his Theory of Morphogenesis, and Super Turing-Machines. Work on the history of computing and the analysis of Turing's philosophical views is ongoing. The Project is also home to the Turing Archive, the most comprehensive single collection in the world of unpublished documents relating to Turing's work in computing.

I'm not quite sure who the Project members are (not Craig Webster any more, I think), but it will be great to read their work.

The National Archive for the History of Computing

This is a proper paper archive held by the University of Manchester. They have scanned a couple of images that you can see, and there are a few more scattered through my website.