One Origin of Digital Humanities: Fr Roberto Busa in His Own Words

239 Pages·2019·3.217 MB·English

by  Julianne Nyhan, Marco Passarotti

Julianne Nyhan
Marco Passarotti
Editors
One Origin
of Digital
Humanities
Fr Roberto Busa
in His Own Words
One Origin of Digital Humanities
Julianne Nyhan Marco Passarotti
(cid:129)
Editors
One Origin of Digital
Humanities
Fr Roberto Busa in His Own Words
Foreword by Steven E. Jones
123
Editors
Julianne Nyhan MarcoPassarotti
University CollegeLondon (UCL) UniversitàCattolica del Sacro Cuore
London,UK Milan,Italy
Translated byPhilip Barras, Andreia Carvalho, andTessaHauswedell
ISBN978-3-030-18311-0 ISBN978-3-030-18313-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18313-4
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Table of Contents

List of Figures ....................................................................................................... ix
List of Tables ......................................................................................................... xi
Foreword ............................................................................................................. xiii
Preface and Acknowledgements .......................................................................... xix
About the editors ................................................................................................ xxv
Chapter 1 Introduction, or Why Busa Still Matters. Marco Passarotti and
Julianne Nyhan ....................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2 A First Example of Word Index Automatically Compiled and Printed
by IBM Punched Card Machines. Roberto Busa S.J. ........................................... 19
Chapter 3 The Use of Punched Cards in Linguistic Analysis. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................... 39
Chapter 4 The Main Problems of the Automation of Written Language. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................... 59
Chapter 5 The Work of the “Centro per l’Automazione dell’Analisi Letteraria”
in Gallarate, Italy. Roberto Busa S.J. ................................................................... 69
Chapter 6 Linguistic Analysis in the Global Evolution of Information. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................... 75
Chapter 7 Latin as a Suitable Computer Language for Science. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................... 87
Chapter 8 Cybernetics and the Possibilities of a New Human Being. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................... 93
Chapter 9 Experienced-Based Results with Preparations for the Use of
Automatic Calculation in Biology. Roberto Busa S.J. ....................................... 105
vii
viii–Table of Contents
Chapter 10 The Function and Use of an Electronic Computer. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................. 111
Chapter 11 Human Errors in the Preparation of Input for Computers. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................. 119
Chapter 12 Models of Knowing and Speaking. Roberto Busa S.J. .................... 125
Chapter 13 Thirty Years of Informatics on Texts: at What Point are We?
What Opportunities for Research? Roberto Busa S.J. ........................................ 135
Chapter 14 The Complete Works of St Thomas Aquinas on CD-ROM with
Hypertexts. Roberto Busa S.J. ............................................................................ 143
Chapter 15 To Do and to Cause to Do: Man and Machine. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................. 149
Chapter 16 Interior Algorithms of Understanding by Reading. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................. 167
Chapter 17 Considering Myself as if I were a Computer. Roberto
Busa S.J. ............................................................................................................ 173
Chapter 18 Doing Philosophy on the Computer and Doing Philosophy with
the Computer. Roberto Busa S.J. ........................................................................ 185
Chapter 19 Roberto Busa S.J. Bibliography: 1949–2009 ................................... 197
Chapter 20 “A Tall, Stooping Figure in Black Crossing the Courtyard”:
Philip Barras’ Recollections of Roberto Busa S.J. Philip Barras and
Julianne Nyhan ................................................................................................... 221
Index ................................................................................................................... 229
List of Figures
Figure 2.1: 27/06/52 (Busa Archive #0010) ......................................................... 19
Figure 3.1: 03/09/58 (Busa Archive #0127) ......................................................... 39
Figure 3.2: Summary of operations ...................................................................... 42
Figure 3.3: Sentence card ..................................................................................... 44
Figure 3.4: Tabulations of a Set of Hypothetical Variants of a Verse from
Dante (Paradiso I, 34) .......................................................................................... 54
Figure 3.5: Simplified block diagram of “Dead Sea Scrolls” processing on
EDPM equipment ................................................................................................. 55
Figure 3.6: 27/09/56 (Busa archive #0032) .......................................................... 56
Figure 5.1: 08/10/61 (Busa archive #0428) .......................................................... 69
Figure 6.1: 19/01/62 (Busa archive #0467) .......................................................... 75
Figure 7.1: 02/09/63 (Busa Archive #0536) ......................................................... 87
Figure 9.1: 25/04/66 (Busa Archive #0590) ....................................................... 105
Figure 10.1: Transposition of the printed text onto a punched card and thence
to magnetic tape .................................................................................................. 117
Figure 11.1: 20/06/67 (Busa Archive #0613) ..................................................... 119
Figure 17.1: A human being is generated by nature, while every machine by
definition is produced by man ............................................................................ 174
Figure 17.2: Caricature of two types of “other” that recur in human
discourse ............................................................................................................. 179
Figure 17.3: A human’s thought is expressed with the production of
knowledge and words ......................................................................................... 175
Figure 17.4: Scheme of items of knowledge and expressions ............................ 176
Figure 17.5: Essential phases of every productive process ................................. 176
Figure 17.6: The unity of knowledge ................................................................. 182
ix
List of Tables
Table 2.2: Sum Es Esse ........................................................................................ 37
Table 12.1: Words other than proper names and special words in the works of
St Thomas ........................................................................................................... 131
xi
Foreword
In a 1962 essay included in the present collection, Father Roberto Busa, S.J.,
looked back at the beginnings of his project in 1949 and admitted: “I was unaware
of the fact that I was placed in the sequence of events by which the automation of
accounting caused the worldwide evolution of the means of information” (see p.
80). That term, “world” or “worldwide” (mondiale, and elsewhere in the same es-
say, tutto il mondo), describes a technological shift, but also the pioneering schol-
ar’s own ambitions for his experiments using machinery to analyse language—
what were sometimes called in English “literary (or linguistic) data processing.”
Those ambitions were global.
The ambitions are reflected in the Busa Archive, which Father Busa himself
first organized by national culture or language. When his work with IBM began,
his own English was not yet very strong. Busa himself later remarked that the
English translation made by someone else for his first major research publication
in 1951 (see Chap. 2), was often awkward (he called it “hilarious”), but that he
couldn’t tell at the time (Roberto Busa to Robert D. Eagleson, July 4, 1966). He
would soon become fluent in English, as he already was in several other world
languages. The languages represented in the archive include not only modern Eng-
lish and European tongues, but, as we might expect, Jesuit-to-Jesuit Latin, includ-
ing some of his earliest correspondence in the 1940s with fellow priests in North
America, paving the way for his transatlantic research program. Half a century lat-
er, Father Busa would characterize his own early work as part of the emergence of
linguistic—as distinct from numerical and scientific—data processing, a “spark . .
. which has developed into a blaze of activity that now covers the entire life of the
world.” (Busa, unpublished autobiographical manuscript).
That image of the “blaze” echoes the famous Jesuit charge attributed to St. Ig-
natius, to “Go forth and set the world on fire.” Father Busa’s global ambitions
were a product of his vocation but also of his historical moment. Although he
claimed to be “the first and only one in the world to venture to saddle the flying
horse with lexicology,” he also acknowledged that, “[i]f it did not come to me, the
idea certainly would have come to someone else, and perhaps one day it may be
known that it came to someone before me, to whom nobody at the time had paid
any attention” (see p. 80). His true contribution to scholarship, he says, was “pa-
tience,” a diligent application which allowed him over time to transform the
“idea” of linguistic data processing “into a mature and practical methodology that
can be applied, so to speak, to a production line” (see p. 80).
Busa arrived in New York City (by way of Canada) in the autumn of 1949, not
long after regular transatlantic passenger voyages had resumed following the war.
After a series of inquiries and referrals he found his way to IBM World Headquar-
ters at 590 Madison Avenue and to the office of the company’s founder, Thomas
J. Watson, Sr. It was an auspicious moment for the company. A plaque mounted
on that building was engraved with one of Watson’s favourite mottos: “World
xiii