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 1943 to 1946, and received his B.S. in physics at
Caltech,
Pasadena, California in 1945. He gained his M.A from
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. 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
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. 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. ==Works==