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Roberto Busa (November 28, 1913 – August 9, 2011) was anItalianJesuit priest and one of the pioneers in the usage of computers for linguistic and literary analysis.[1][2][3] He was the author of theIndex Thomisticus, a completelemmatization of the works ofSaint Thomas Aquinas and of a few related authors.
Born inVicenza, the second of five children, he attended primary school inBolzano and grammar school inVerona and inBelluno. 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 futurePope John Paul I. In 1933 he joined theSociety of Jesus, 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 ofOntology,Theodicy andScientific Methodology and, for some years, a librarian in the "Aloisianum" Faculty of Philosophy ofGallarate.
In 1946 he planned theIndex Thomisticus, as a tool for performing text searches within the massive corpus of Aquinas's works. In 1949 he met withThomas J. Watson, the founder ofIBM, and was able to persuade him to sponsor theIndex Thomisticus.[4] The project lasted about 30 years, and eventually produced in the 1970s the 56 printed volumes of theIndex 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.[5] In 2006 theIndex Thomisticus Treebank project (directed by Marco Passarotti) started the syntactic annotation of the entire corpus.[6]
TheAlliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) awards the "Busa Prize", which honors leaders in the field ofhumanities computing. Thefirst Busa Prize was awarded in 1998 to Busa himself. Later winners include:
Before his death, Busa had been teaching at the PapalGregorian University in Rome, at the "Aloisianum" Faculty of Philosophy inGallarate, and at the Catholic Sacred Heart University inMilan. He was also working at theLessico 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 byJulianne Nyhan and Marco Passarotti.[11]
