Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards

by Steven E. Jones

It's the founding myth of humanities computing and digital humanities: In 1949, the Italian Jesuit scholar, Roberto Busa, S.J., persuaded IBM to offer technical and financial support for the mechanized creation of a massive lemmatized concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Using Busa's own papers, recently accessioned in Milan, as well as IBM archives and other sources, Jones illuminates this DH origin story. He examines relationships between the layers of hardware, software, human agents, culture, and history, and answers the question of how specific technologies afford and even constrain cultural practices, including in this case the academic research agendas of humanities computing and, later, digital humanities.

186 pages, ebook

First published March 1, 2016

Reviews

[Allan Olley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an engaging academic look at an early application of computers to literary studies (in this case mostly compiling of a word usage concordance/index) that tries to explain the institutional and cultural context with in it emerged. This is the work of Jesuit priest Roberto Busa who worked on a concordance of the work of Thomas Aquinas, the Index Thomisticus,. Some time is spent contextualizing and explaining the intellectual import of Busa's work in the broader field of digital humanities, but not too much time is spent on the technical detail, content or specific impact of his work.

The focus of the text is more the corporate culture of IBM and attitudes of society toward computers and innovation at the time and how they framed the motivations, process and of Busa's work. Also discussed is Busa's intensive work networking with other scholars and finding corporate and other patronage. The book focuses on Busa's work with IBM from the 1940s to about 1970, this is work on the Index Thomisticus, and also a never complete work on a concordance for a portion of the Dead Sea scrolls, which IBM heavily promoted at the time. This focus on limited early work means that the story feels somewhat incomplete at least to me, but it gives a definite flavour and taste for Busa's work.

My own academic work has been looking at the same period and location (IBM's Thomas J. Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University founded in 1945) that is prominent in this book and so I am familiar with many of the primary sources (interviews, letters and other archival materials) he is citing. While he missed one or two things and he is not a computer historian so his command of the secondary literature there is somewhat limited, he has made good use of those sources that do exist, often somewhat obscure ones such as the papers of IBM engineer, A. Wayne Brooke. He not only manages to give us comprehensive evidence and background for his presentation of the events and setting of the story, but I think brings genuine insight to his presentation of ideas.