Metaphorum 2026 · Stafford Beer in Latin America: Governance and the Politics of Possibility

Cybersyn Boxes. Prototyping a Document Visualisation Assisted by AI

The Cybersyn Project records in the Stafford Beer Archive (SBA) at Liverpool John Moores University offer insight into cybernetic and management science thought, capturing the intellectual process behind concepts like the Viable System Model (VSM) through handwritten notes, diagrams, and correspondence. Currently, there is no visualisation that supports relational exploration of these archives, making it difficult to trace how ideas, correspondence, and diagrams connect. Data visualisation is a way to show complex structures visually, facilitating pattern recognition and exploration. This project argues for representing collections like the SBA through visualisation, enabling multi-perspective views of records and going beyond the usual document-by-document viewing. The project explores visualisation to support navigation through these documents, revealing how individual records relate to the whole and how people and concepts connect, and enabling intuitive exploration of complex archives. This project addresses three challenges: (a) adapting knowledge graphs to the archival materials, (b) developing strategies for natural-language querying, and (c) designing automated visualisation. In doing so, it advances research in Visualisation, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Digital Humanities by treating visualisation as a means of knowledge discovery. Building on this, the project clarifies how GenAI, LLMs, and Knowledge Graphs enhance visualisation, opening access to an archive significant to the history of technology in Chile and the world. This proposal seeks to show some of the project's progress, allowing an overview of the potential applications across different areas such as human rights, arts, and the humanities, among others. Speaker: Ricardo Vega Mora — Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC)

Schedule to be confirmed