Complex Weavers Ralph Griswold

Ralph Griswold 1934-2006 - an Interview in December 2004

Ralph Griswold is well-known to CW members for his support of the CW library, his providing the content for CW CD's 1-5, and his making available on his website (http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/ ) many downloadable pdf files of works on weaving. We thought we would like to find out more about him.

Ralph has BS, MS, and PhD degrees from Stanford University. He worked for a time at Bell Labs (now Lucent) where he was instrumental in producing the computer language SNOBOL and its successors. In 1971 he became the first professor of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. Since that time, he has been involved in producing other computer languages (notably Icon) and has authored or co-authored several books, some with his wife Madge. They have two children and three granddaughters. In 1995 he retired from teaching but he continues intellectually active.

Ralph's website is an unparalleled resource for weavers. The site started in May 1999. The first document was Cyrus Uhler's Draught and Cording, made from scans done at Lebanon Valley College Library. The first document scanned locally was de Lantsheere's Trésor de L'Art Dentellier from a dilapidated original purchased at a sale at the University of Arizona Library. In early November, 2004, the site had approximately 479 Web pages and 4,771 PDF documents containing 114,169 document pages. The articles are from 177 sources. Twenty-eight periodicals in eighteen languages are represented. For the calendar years for which there is complete data, the number of PDFs successfully downloaded was: 2002: 126,256; 2003: 269,467. In recent months, more than 50,000 files have been downloaded per month. So Ralph believes that this site is a valuable resource and worth maintaining.

Q: How did your on-line archive of old weaving documents get started? Where is it now and where is it going?
A: In 1999, scanned images of Cyrus Uhler's weaver's book Draught and Cording were posted on the Web. Because they were individual images, they were awkward to use. I downloaded them all and created a document (PDF) and put it on my Web site. The reaction from weavers was very enthusiastic, which encouraged me to scan old books and add them to the site. All kinds of documents and some subjects not directly related to weaving are now included. And I'm adding more all the time. I would add that scanning documents and putting the results on the Web is tedious and time consuming. On average, it takes about two minutes per page from start to finish. For me, the results are worth it, I learn a lot, and, frankly, finding old documents is a lot of fun.

Q: How did you get interested in weaving?
A: I retired early from my position as Professor of Computer Science to have more time to spend on my intellectual interests. One of these was patterns of all kinds which have been a life-long obsession. While exploring the pattern-creation capabilities of the Painter [now Corel Painter] program, I discovered it could not only produce weave patterns, but it had a hidden facility for designing weave drafts using a language that described sequences. This fascinated me, since most of my professional career had been devoted to programming language design. I was hooked and started out to learn all I could about weaving. I was fascinated by the possibilities for applying simple mathematical and computational techniques to weave design and also to organize apparently disparate topics in a simple and unified ways. All else followed from this.

Q: Are you a weaver?
A: No. Until I became interested in weaving as described above, I knew next to nothing about weaving. And there had been no weavers in my family or among my friends. Learning to weave was the first thing I wanted to do after learning a little. But by that time, I was spending all my time on research, writing, and building the on-line archive of old weaving documents. I realized I would have to give up some of these things and also that weaving takes a lot of time. So I deliberately decided not to learn to weave. That leaves me ignorant of many important aspects of weaving that only doing it can provide. I realized I'm seriously handicapped by this and that weaving for me is an essentially abstract subject.

Q: What are you doing now?

A: I'm doing in general terms pretty much what I've been doing for the past few years:

Adding documents to my Web site.
Creating CDs of material on my Web site (Web sites are inherently ephemeral, especially ones like mine which is an individual effort).
Working on various research projects related to weaving.
A new issue for my Web site is the recent availability of information about copyright renewals. I hope to find material in the period of 1923-1963 which is now in the public domain.
My current research projects include stripe design, motif placement, and pattern transformations.
A recent addition to my activities is providing drafts and other support for Kris Bruland's Web site, which offers free weaving drafts.

Q: Any "grand plans"?
A: For some time I have thought about writing a book with the tentative title Mathematical and Computational Topics in Weaving. The book would be published on the Web. Most of the material would come from revised and reorganized articles that I've already published on the Web. The problem is that I keep coming up with new things. I rather suspect my working on new things is more important than making a better presentation of what I've already done. Besides, working on new things is a lot more fun than revising old ones.

Q: What's the one most satisfying thing you've done with respect to weaving?
A: Crackle-weave drafts. Kris Bruland asked me if I could produce some for his site. At the time, I knew next to nothing about crackle. I read everything I could find, thought a while about it, and came up with a simpler method for producing crackle-weave drafts than I'd found in the literature. Then I wrote a program to explore "crackle-weave space", trying different combinations of the possibilities. Most were interesting and some were like I'd not seen anywhere. All-in-all, there were 810 worthwhile ones. They have been received very well and I've heard from several experienced weavers that the drafts had rekindled their interest in crackle.

Q: Do you ever use a weaving draw-down program?
A: I got some commercial weaving programs when I was first learning about weaving. But, being a programmer and wanting to approach weave design in a different way, I wrote my own program. It is very powerful, but it is written for programmers, not general users (it allows the users to enter program code interactively).

Q; What are your plans for the future?
A: Basically, more of the same. There's no shortage of material for the digital archive. In that regard, I plan to work on getting some of the harder-to-find classics. With respect to my research interests, I'd like to be able to do for other kinds of weaves what I did for crackle. Overshot is a definite possibility.

Q: Do you have a favorite weaving book, either as a reference or as something beautiful to look at?
A: Franz Donat's Die Farbige Gewebmusterung [Polychrome Patterning]. It's on my Web site. [It's also available on CW's CD # 4].

Q: Do you have a favorite weave structure?
A: Fancy twills.

Q: You mentioned the application of mathematics and computation to weaving. Can you be more specific?
A: There are really two aspects to this. One is applying simple mathematical notions and a formal logical approach to problems related to weaving. I've been able to use this to clarify topics like satin counters and various kinds of drafting techniques. The other aspect is writing programs to do specific tasks. For example, programs to determine whether an interlacement is sound, and if not, to use color-and-weave effects to produce an alternative, sound interlacement. I have particularly enjoyed writing programs to create patterns and drafts of certain kinds (like crackle weave) or according to certain rules (like generating fractal drafts). The advantage of programs like this is that they can try an enormous number of possibilities quickly and accurately -- something no human being can or would do. So they can produce results that cannot be produced by hand, not to mention they often find interesting results where a human being would not think to look. I write short, informal articles on my explorations and publish them on my Web site.

Q: Do you have any hobbies or sports interests?
A: I like to tinker with mechanical objects and I'm a football fan. [He didn't say what team.]

Q: Thank you very much. I'm off to your website to do a lot of downloading.

Websites referenced: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/ (the entry to Ralph's weaving documents)
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/stats.html (statistics)
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~ralph/index.html (Ralph's own home page)
http://www.handweaving.net/ (Kris Bruland's site)

Originally published in the Complex Weaver's Journal, January, 2005. Used with permission.

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