Index Thomisticus

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Roberto Busa (2006); in the background, the Index Thomisticus

The Index Thomisticus was a digital humanities project begun in the 1940s that created a concordance to 179 texts centering around Thomas Aquinas. Led by Roberto Busa, the project indexed 10,631,980 words over the course of 34 years, initially onto punched cards. It is considered a pioneering project in the field of digital humanities.

Project

Busa began the project in 1946.

lemmatised in a semi-automatic process.[4]

The completed project indexed a total of 10,631,980 words in fifty-six volumes over 70,000 pages—divided into ten volumes of indexes, followed by thirty-one volumes of concordances of Aquinas's works, eight volumes of concordances of related authors, and seven volumes that reprinted the source texts.[2][7] The seven completely reprinting the source texts were sold separately.[2] The first volume was published in 1974,[8] and publication was completed in 1980. The project used a total of 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) of tape [9] and it took an estimated 10,000 hours of computer work and 1 million hours of human work to complete.[3] The Index was released on CD-ROM in 1992 and a website was launched in 2005.[9]

Reception, impact, and legacy

A review published of the project in

pedantic work ever written".[7] In 2020, The Economist described it as "the creation story of the digital humanities."[9] An article in Umanistica Digitale wrote that "the project developed for the first time, methods for dealing with unstructured language".[11] It influenced projects such as Key Word in Context.[11] The project is also sometimes listed as one of the earliest instances of an e-book.[12]

References

  1. S2CID 38602853
    .
  2. ^ a b c d Burton 1984, pp. 109–110.
  3. ^
    ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2020-12-27.
  4. ^
    ISBN 978-3-11-023813-6
    .
  5. JSTOR 23576117
    .
  6. ^ Rockwell & Passarotti 2019, p. 13.
  7. ^
    S2CID 171327330
    .
  8. ISSN 0001-253X
    .
  9. ^
    ISSN 0013-0613
    . Retrieved 2020-12-27.
  10. ^ Burton 1984, p. 109.
  11. ^ a b Rockwell & Passarotti 2019, p. 15.
  12. ISSN 0004-8623
    .

Bibliography
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