The new book I’ve been working on for the past year, Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards, is now at the press, and will be published by Routledge in spring 2016. It’s about the Italian Jesuit scholar who collaborated with IBM to produce a massive concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, among other projects, starting in 1949. This story has become the founding myth of humanities computing and, by extension, digital humanities. I aim to complicate the myth with history. I use Busa’s own papers, recently accessioned in Milan, as well as the IBM Archives and other sources, to write what I think of as the biography of his research project in its first decade, 1949-1959. Combining a media-archaeology and platform-studies approach with archival research, I explore the question of how the specific technologies of the punched-card data-processing era afforded and constrained the academic research agenda of humanities computing at the moment of its emergence.
Watch this space for more on the book and on a dedicated website in support of the book that will contain a collection of archival photographs and other contextual information.
Steven E. Jones 