Roberto Busa (November 28, 1913 – August 9, 2011) was an
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
Jesuit
, image = Ihs-logo.svg
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, caption = ChristogramOfficial seal of the Jesuits
, abbreviation = SJ
, nickname = Jesuits
, formation =
, founders ...
priest and one of the pioneers in the usage of computers for linguistic and literary analysis. He was the author of 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, initia ...
'', a complete
lemmatization
Lemmatisation ( or lemmatization) in linguistics is the process of grouping together the inflected forms of a word so they can be analysed as a single item, identified by the word's lemma, or dictionary form.
In computational linguistics, lemma ...
of the works of
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, OP (; it, Tommaso d'Aquino, lit=Thomas of Aquino; 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest who was an influential philosopher, theologian and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism; he is known wit ...
and of a few related authors.
Biography
Born in
Vicenza
Vicenza ( , ; ) is a city in northeastern Italy. It is in the Veneto region at the northern base of the ''Monte Berico'', where it straddles the Bacchiglione River. Vicenza is approximately west of Venice and east of Milan.
Vicenza is a th ...
, the second of five children, he attended primary school in
Bolzano
Bolzano ( or ; german: Bozen, (formerly ); bar, Bozn; lld, Balsan or ) is the capital city of the province of South Tyrol in northern Italy. With a population of 108,245, Bolzano is also by far the largest city in South Tyrol and the third la ...
and grammar school in
Verona
Verona ( , ; vec, Verona or ) is a city on the Adige River in Veneto, Northern Italy, Italy, with 258,031 inhabitants. It is one of the seven provincial capitals of the region. It is the largest city Comune, municipality in the region and the ...
and in
Belluno
Belluno (; lld, Belum; vec, Belùn) is a town and province in the Veneto region of northern Italy. Located about north of Venice, Belluno is the capital of the province of Belluno and the most important city in the Eastern Dolomites region ...
. In 1928 he entered the Episcopal Seminary of Belluno, completing high school there, and took the first two-year course of Theology with Albino Luciani, the future
Pope John Paul I
Pope John Paul I ( la, Ioannes Paulus I}; it, Giovanni Paolo I; born Albino Luciani ; 17 October 1912 – 28 September 1978) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City from 26 August 1978 to his death 33 days later. Hi ...
. In 1933 he joined the
Society of Jesus
, image = Ihs-logo.svg
, image_size = 175px
, caption = ChristogramOfficial seal of the Jesuits
, abbreviation = SJ
, nickname = Jesuits
, formation =
, founders ...
, where he got a diploma in Philosophy in 1937 and one in Theology in 1941 and where he was ordained priest in 1940. From 1940 till 1943 he was an auxiliary army chaplain in the National Army and later in the partisan forces. In 1946 he graduated in Philosophy at the Papal Gregorian University of Rome with a degree thesis entitled "The Thomistic Terminology of Interiority", which was published in 1949. He was full professor of
Ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...
,
Theodicy
Theodicy () means vindication of God. It is to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil, thus resolving the issue of the problem of evil. Some theodicies also address the problem of evil "to make the existence of ...
and
Scientific Methodology
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
and, for some years, a librarian in the "Aloisianum" Faculty of Philosophy of
Gallarate
Gallarate (; Lombard: ''Galaraa'') is a city and ''comune'' of Alto Milanese of Lombardy and of Milan metropolitan area, northern Italy, in the Province of Varese. It has a population of some 54,000 people.
It is the junction of railways to Va ...
.
The ''Index Thomisticus''
In 1946 he planned the ''Index Thomisticus'', as a tool for performing text searches within the massive corpus of Aquinas's works. In 1949 he met with
Thomas J. Watson
Thomas John Watson Sr. (February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956) was an American businessman who served as the chairman and CEO of IBM. He oversaw the company's growth into an international force from 1914 to 1956. Watson developed IBM's manageme ...
, the founder of
IBM, and was able to persuade him to sponsor the ''Index Thomisticus''. The project lasted about 30 years, and eventually produced in the 1970s the 56 printed volumes of the ''Index Thomisticus''. In 1989, a CD-ROM version was produced. In addition, in 2005 a web-based version made its debut, sponsored by the Fundación Tomás de Aquino and CAEL; the design and programming of this version were carried about by E. Alarcón and E. Bernot, in collaboration with Busa. In 2006 the ''Index Thomisticus Treebank'' project (directed by Marco Passarotti) started the syntactic annotation of the entire corpus.
The Busa Prize
The
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is a digital humanities umbrella organization formed in 2005 to coordinate the activities of several regional DH organizations, referred to as constituent organizations. ADHO's constituent o ...
(ADHO) awards the "Busa Prize", which honors leaders in the field of
humanities computing
Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analy ...
. The
first Busa Prize was awarded in 1998 to Busa himself. Later winners include:
* John Burrows (Australia) (presented in 2001, New York, New York, USA)
*
Susan Hockey (UK) (presented in 2004, Gothenburg, Sweden)
* Wilhelm Ott (Germany) (2007, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, USA)
* Joseph Raben (USA) (2010, King's College London, UK)
*
Willard McCarty Willard McCarty is Professor of Humanities Computing in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, England, where he is director of the doctoral programme in the department. He is a visiting professor in the Digital Humanities R ...
(UK) (2013, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA)
* Helen Agüera (USA) (2016, Kraków, Poland)
*Tito Orlandi (Italy) (2019, Utrecht, Netherlands)
Later projects
Before his death, Busa had been teaching at the Papal
Gregorian University
The Pontifical Gregorian University ( it, Pontificia Università Gregoriana; also known as the Gregorian or Gregoriana,) is a higher education ecclesiastical school (pontifical university) located in Rome, Italy.
The Gregorian originated as ...
in Rome, at the "Aloisianum" Faculty of Philosophy in
Gallarate
Gallarate (; Lombard: ''Galaraa'') is a city and ''comune'' of Alto Milanese of Lombardy and of Milan metropolitan area, northern Italy, in the Province of Varese. It has a population of some 54,000 people.
It is the junction of railways to Va ...
, and at the Catholic Sacred Heart University in
Milan
Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...
. He was also working at the ''Lessico Tomistico Biculturale'' (Bicultural Thomistic Lexicon) project, which aims at understanding the Latin concepts used by Thomas Aquinas in the terms of contemporary culture. A selection of his works has been collected and translated by
Julianne Nyhan and Marco Passarotti.
References
External links
Corpus ThomisticumWeb-based Index Thomisticus search engineIndex Thomisticus TreebankAssociation for Literary and Linguistic Computing - Honorary MembersDigital Humanities WebHome''Time Magazine'', Dec. 31, 1956.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Busa, Roberto
1913 births
2011 deaths
People from Vicenza
20th-century Italian Roman Catholic theologians
20th-century Italian Jesuits
People in digital humanities
Information architects
21st-century Italian Jesuits
Italian chaplains