One Origin of Digital Humanities

This book gathers, and makes available in English, with new introductions, previously out of print or otherwise difficult to access articles by Fr Roberto Busa S.J. (1913 - 2011). Also included is a comprehensive bibliography of Busa, an oral history interview with Busa's translator, and a substantial new chapter that evaluates Busa's contributions and intellectual legacies. The result is a groundbreaking book that is of interest to digital humanists and computational linguists as well as historians of science, technology and the humanities. As the application of computing to cultural heritage becomes ever more ubiquitous, new possibilities for transmitting, shaping, understanding, questioning and even imagining the human record are opening up. Busa is considered by many to be among the pioneers in this field, and his research on projects like the Index Thomisticus is one of the earliest known examples of a humanities project that incorporated automation; it continues to be widely cited and used today. Busa published more than 350 academic articles and shorter pieces in numerous languages, but despite the unquestionable importance of his early work for understanding the history and development of fields like humanities computing and computational linguistics, a large part of his canon and thinking remained inaccessible or difficult to access until this book.

Auteur

Julianne Nyhan is Associate Professor of Digital Information Studies at UCL (University College London), where she leads the Digital Humanities MA/MSc programme. She is also Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Nyhan has published widely on the history of Digital Humanities, most recently (with Andrew Flinn) Computation and the Humanities: towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities (Springer 2016). She is a co-Investigator of a Leverhulme-funded collaboration with the British Museum on the manuscript catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane; a UK Principal Investigator of a digging into data challenge 'Oceanic Exchanges: tracing global information networks in historical newspapers'; and a co-Investigator of a Marie Curie action 'Critical Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe'.

Marco Passarotti is Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy), where he is Director of the CIRCSE Research Centre. A former pupil of Fr Roberto Busa S.J., since 2006 he has headed the Index Thomisticus Treebank project, which continues the legacy of Busa's work on the opera omnia of Thomas Aquinas. He is the Principal Investigator of the LiLa project, an ERC-Consolidator Grant (2018-2023) which aims to build a Linked Data Knowledge Base of linguistic resources and natural language processing tools for Latin. He co-chairs the series of workshops on 'Corpus-based Research in the Humanities' (CRH).

Contenu

List of Figures

List of Tables

Foreword

Preface and Acknowledgements

About the editors

Chapter 1 Introduction, or Why Busa Still Matters. Marco Passarotti and Julianne Nyhan

Chapter 2 A First Example of Word Index Automatically Compiled and Printed by IBM Punched Card Machines. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 3 The Use of Punched Cards in Linguistic Analysis. RobertoBusa S.J.

Chapter 4 The Main Problems of the Automation of Written Language. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 5 The Work of the Centro per l'Automazione dell'Analisi Letteraria in Gallarate, Italy. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 6 Linguistic Analysis in the Global Evolution of Information. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 7 Latin as a Suitable Computer Language for Science. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 8 Cybernetics and the Possibilities of a New Human Being. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 9 Experienced-Based Results with Preparations for the Use of Automatic Calculation in Biology. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 10 The Function and Use of an Electronic Computer. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 11 Human Errors in the Preparation of Input for Computers. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 12 Models of Knowing and Speaking. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 13 Thirty Years of Informatics on Texts: at What Point are We? What Opportunities for Research? Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 14 The Complete Works of St Thomas Aquinas on CD-ROM with Hypertexts. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 15 To Do and to Cause to Do: Man and Machine. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 16 Interior Algorithms of Understanding by Reading. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 17 Considering Myself as if I were a Computer. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 18 Doing Philosophy on the Computer and Doing Philosophy with the Computer. Roberto Busa S.J.

Chapter 19 Roberto Busa S.J. Bibliography: 19492009

Chapter 20 A Tall, Stooping Figure in Black Crossing the Courtyard: Philip Barras' Recollections of Roberto Busa S.J. Philip Barras and Julianne Nyhan

Index