Roberto Busa

Biography

Roberto Busa is an Italian Jesuit priest born in 1913 in Vicenza. He became a doctor in 1946 with a thesis about the metaphysics of the presence in the corpus of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

The Index Thomisticus

In order to achieve his thesis, Roberto Busa had to find all occurrences of the terms prasens and prasentia, however he quickly noticed that he also needed to find all usages of the preposition in. Because of the frequency of the word in, it was not already present in the existing indexes from the middle-age, thus he had to create around 10'000 cards with references by hand. While doing this work, he realized that every work of interpretation of an author needed to find the particularities of his "verbal system" and thus wanted to create a complete index of the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas.[1]. He planned the "Index Thomisticus" as a tool for performing text searches in Aquina's works. [2] His initial quest of indexing all the works of Aquina word by word marked the beginning of the Digital Humanities. [3]

He reached to IBM in 1949 and obtained their help. In 1980 the printed edition of 56 encyclopedic volumes of the Index Thomisticus was produced. 11'000'000 cards were used in order to produce the index. [4]