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.But what of machine translation, that's almost as old?
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.
I know, I know, the genealogy may spring from the same root, but its branches went in a different, very different, direction. But still, isn't translation a characteristically humanistic activity, one of the most fundamental? All those biblical texts translated into Latin and Greek, all those classical texts translated into modern European tongues, not to mention translations from Sanskrit, Mandarin, and all those other many tongues.
Perhaps it's too dangerous to reclaim that aspect of our heritage? Because then we'd have to follow computing deep into the heart of language and the mind.
But what of the soul, of the spirit? Do not fold, bend, mutilate, or spindle!*
Wouldn't want to do that, would we? The computer is a tool of the Devil. Why?
Because capitalism, because imperialism, because patriarchy, because racism! Because EVIL.
Still, computing is a child of the soul, an avatar of the spirit. What are we to do? Should we not reclaim it? Must we remain imprisoned in the 60s forever, an era when many of us were not even born?
Besides, if we're already using the computer to do back-room grunt work, then we've already entered the Devil's Workshop. We might as well look at our hands and see what they're doing to stave off idleness. Really, there's no way out. We're committed.
We need a properly revisionist history of our discipline.
*Some links: Free Speech Movement: Do Not Fold, Bend, Mutilate or Spindle, "Do Not Fold, Bend, Mutilate or Spindle": A Cultural History of the Punch Card.
