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  • © 2019

One Origin of Digital Humanities

Fr Roberto Busa in His Own Words

  • Makes available in English key selected works of Fr Roberto Busa S.J., pioneer of Digital Humanities and Computational Linguistics
  • Contains new material that evaluates Busa's intellectual contributions and legacy
  • Includes a full bibliography of Busa's work from 1949 to 2009

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Table of contents (19 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xliii
  2. The Use of Punched Cards in Linguistic Analysis

    • S. J. Roberto Busa
    Pages 39-57
  3. Latin as a Suitable Computer Language for Science

    • S. J. Roberto Busa
    Pages 87-92
  4. The Function and Use of an Electronic Computer

    • S. J. Roberto Busa
    Pages 111-117
  5. Models of Knowing and Speaking

    • S. J. Roberto Busa
    Pages 125-133
  6. To Do and to Cause to Do: Man and Machine

    • S. J. Roberto Busa
    Pages 149-166
  7. Interior Algorithms of Understanding by Reading

    • S. J. Roberto Busa
    Pages 167-172
  8. Considering Myself as if I were a Computer

    • S. J. Roberto Busa
    Pages 173-183
  9. Roberto Busa S.J. Bibliography: 1949–2009

    • S. J. Roberto Busa
    Pages 197-220

About this book

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.

Editors and Affiliations

  • University College London (UCL), London, UK

    Julianne Nyhan

  • Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

    Marco Passarotti

About the editors

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 theCIRCSE 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).

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access