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.

This past week I’ve been visiting CIRCSE research center at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, digging into the fairly recently accessioned archive of Father Roberto Busa, SJ, often said to be the founder of humanities computing. I’m working on a book on the first decade of his research in historical context, 1949-1959, tentatively titled The Priest and the Punched-Card Machines. My hosts here, especially Dr. Marco Passarotti, have been very kind and helpful, and I’ve handled and examined a fascinating collection of letters and other documents, as well as punched cards, magnetic-tape reels, floppy disks, slides, and fragile glass transparencies, among other artifacts and texts. Today I visited the location of Fr. Busa’s  first humanities computing labs in Gallarate, or locations for, as he called it, “Literary Data Analysis.”