Roberto Busa, S. J. , and the Emergence of Humanities Computing

Published in 2016, this scholarly volume examines the pioneering work of Italian Jesuit priest Roberto Busa, who is widely recognized as the father of humanities computing. The book contextualizes Busa's massive undertaking, the Index Thomisticus, which began in the mid-twentieth century and involved the monumental task of lemmatizing the complete works of Thomas Aquinas using early IBM computer technology. Jones frames this history not merely as a technical milestone, but as a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of the digital humanities.

Steven E. Jones, a professor specializing in digital culture, crafted this study to bridge the gap between early experimental computational linguistic methods and contemporary digital humanities research. The narrative explores Busa's complex partnership with Thomas J. Watson of IBM and the evolving methodology of indexing human language. The book received critical praise within academic circles for its meticulous archival research and its thoughtful analysis of how the material constraints of early computing shaped the evolution of scholarly inquiry in the humanities.