Instant History, The Postwar Digital Humanities and Their Legacies: A Day Conference

Instant History Flyer: download a .pdf of the flyer.

In 1949, Jesuit scholar, Father Roberto Busa began to collaborate with IBM to build a massive lemmatized concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. By the mid 1950s he had established in Milan the first humanities computing center, which both IBM and Father Busa referred to as a Center for Literary Data Processing. This turn toward thinking of texts as data – or as potential sources of data – to be processed using computers and algorithmic, quantitative methods, has its legacy in many of today's digital humanities and electronic textuality, from the creation of electronic editions to so-called distant reading and quantitative analyses and visualizations of very large corpora of texts.

Our day-conference will explore several aspects of this legacy of Father Busa's mid-century humanities computing, including the history of natural language processing and digital text processing, systems of textual markup and the creation of digital scholarly editions, topic modeling and large-corpora analysis.

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Saturday, September 24th, 2016, Information Commons, 4th Floor

Lake Shore Campus, Loyola University Chicago

6501 N. Kenmore Avenue

8:30 a.m. – 5:15 p.m.

For more information, contact: Prof. Paul Eggert at peggert@luc.edu