Getting Involved With the Digital Humanities in Theology, Biblical Studies, and Religious Studies

Abstract

It is of particular interest to my intentions here — encouraging theological and religious studies libraries and librarians to become more involved with the digital humanities — that the generally recognized pioneer of this movement was a theologian, and his project was theological in nature. Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest, developed in 1949 a computerized linguistic concordance of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Busa’s Index Thomisticus1 took thirty years to complete, and early-on he recognized he would need assistance with this ambitious and momentous undertaking. “In 1946...I started to think of an Index Thomisticus, a concordance of all the words of Thomas Aquinas, including conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns, to serve other scholars for analogous studies....It was clear to me...that to process texts containing more than ten million words, I had to look for some type of machinery.”2