Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reverse Engineering The First Humanities Computing Center, Steven E. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The Jesuit scholar, Roberto Busa, is often called the founder of humanities computing. In fact, starting as early as 1949, he collaborated with IBM to perform experiments using suites of punched-card machines. These punched-card data systems—with their plug-board setups, clacking machinery, and flurries of perforated rectangular cards—were developed for business accounting and tabulating, and adapted for government censuses, defense calculations, archival management, and information processing of all kinds. The first decade of humanities computing can more accurately be described as an era of humanities data processing—in the historically specific and contextually rich sense of the term. This essay describes an …