NEH and the Digital Humanities: The Early Years
alice wellintown
alicewellintown at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 06:32:56 CDT 2013
In the years following World War II, the sciences—physical,
biological, and social—embraced computers to work on complex
calculations, but it took the humanities a little longer to see the
value of computing. One of the biggest challenges for humanists was
the question of how to turn language, the core operating system of the
humanities, into numbers in order to be compiled and calculated. At
this point in the history of computing, all data had to be in
numerical form. It’s not sur-prising, then, that some of the first
humanities projects were indexes and concordances, since the location
of a word could be given a numerical value.
The first concordance was made for the Vulgate Bible, under the
direction of Hugo of St-Cher, a Dominican scholar of theology and
member of the faculty at the University of Paris. When completed in
1230, the Concordantiae Sacrorum Bibliorum enabled the Dominicans to
locate every mention of “lamb” or “sacrifice” or “adultery.” According
to legend, five hundred monks toiled to complete the concordance.
Herein lay the challenge of making concordances and indexes: You
either had to command a team of multitudes or be willing to devote
yourself to the project for years. John Bartlett, he of the Familiar
Quotations, spent two decades working with his wife on the first full
Shakespeare concordance. The volume, given the unwieldy name of New
and Complete Concordance or Verbal Index to Words, Phrases and
Passages in the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, with a supplementing
concordance to his poems (1894), ran to 1,910 pages.
The story of digital humanities often begins with another theologian
on a quest to make a concordance. In the mid 1940s, Father Roberto
Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest, latched onto the idea of making a
master index of works by Saint Thomas Aquinas and related authors.
Busa had written his dissertation on “the metaphysics of presence” in
Aquinas. Looking for the answer, he created 10,000 hand-written index
cards. His work demonstrated the importance of how an author uses a
particular word, especially prepositions. But making an index for all
of Aquinas’s works required wrangling ten million words of Medieval
Latin. It seemed an impossible task.
In 1949, Busa’s search for a solution led him to the United States and
International Business Machines, better known as IBM, which had a
patent on the resources Busa needed to realize his project. Without
the company’s help, his vision for a master concordance would remain
just a dream.
http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/julyaugust/feature/the-rise-the-machines
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