Utente:Lydia Tuan/Roberto Busa

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Father Roberto Busa in 2006 (in front of volumes of the Index Thomisticus).
Cemetery of Crenna (fraction of Gallarate): the tomb of Father Busa.

Roberto Busa (Vicenza, November 28, 1913 – Gallarate, August 9, 2011) was an Italian Jesuit priest, linguist, and Italian computer scientist. According to Thomas Nelson Winter, he pioneered the use of applied information to linguistics (a discipline known today as Computational Linguistics).[1][2][3] He created the Index Thomisticus, a complete lemmatization of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas and of a few related authors.

Biography[modifica | modifica wikitesto]

The second of five children, he attended secondary school in Belluno and, in 1928, entered the local seminary under the tutelage of Albino Luciana, the future Pope John Paul I. In 1933, he joined the Society of Jesus. He dedicated 13 years of his life to the study of linguistics (1933-1946), learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, English, Spanish and German. In 1937, he received an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, followed by one in Theology in 1941.

On May 31, 1940 he was ordinated priest, just ten days before Italy's entry into the second World War. Busa was destined to become a military ordinariate, but the provincials selected him for cultural services.[4] Throughout the entire war, he lectured Papal Gregorian University and worked on a thesis on the doctrine of the "presence" in San Tommaso, examining the entire work of the saint, which totalled approximately nine million words.

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, Theodicy and Scientific Methodology and, for some years, also a librarian in the "Aloisianum" Faculty of Philosophy of Gallarate.

He taught at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome, at the "Aloisianum" of Gallarate, and at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.

Busa died on August 9, 2011 at the age of 97.[5] He is buried in the cemetery of Crenna, a district of Gallarate.

The Index Thomisticus[modifica | modifica wikitesto]

Busa with Pope Paul Vi.
Father Roberto Busa SJ - Tomb. Cemetery of Crenna (Gallarate, VA).

In 1946, while writing his thesis at the Pontifical Gregorian University, he worked on the idea of a timely and complete verification of Tommaso d'Aquino's lexicon. The inspiration for his vast research came from an observation of this particular detail: in San Tommaso, the concept of "interiority" is present in the form essere in (literally 'to be in'); however "the recurrence of the particle in was not available in some of the concordances dedicated to d'Aquino's works of the time."[6]

Father Busa decided to start his work over and handwrite 10,000 index cards. Then he realized that the task was too strenuous and started to look for an automatic machine that could analyze the entries.[4] Amongst the various institutions he contacted included IBM of New York. In 1949, Busa met with its president Thomas Watson, whom he convincingly asked to access the calculators (punched card machines), which Busa used to actualize the project.[7] At Gallarate, Busa set up a laboratory and began to examine, word by word, all of San Tommaso's texts.[8] The work consisted of a lexicografical analysis of virtually nine million words that constituted the opera omnia of San Tommaso d'Aquino, with an additional two million words of other Latin authors. Father Busa created the method, terminology, and the procedure.[4]

At the time, the only recording media were punch cards: Father Busa calculated that he had to print twelve million cards. He calculated the amount of space that the file would have occupied: 90 meters in width, 1.2 meters in height, and 1 meter in depth for a weight of approximately 500 metric tons.[9] By the time he completed half of the work (six million cards), the magnetic tape had been invented. Right away, Busa experimented new technological solutions passing from punch cards to magnetic tape (1800 pieces for a total length of approximately 1500 km).

In 1980, ending a project that lasted thirty years, Busa completed the print edition of the Index Thomisticus in 56 volumes, for nearly 70,000 pages and 11 million words. Father Busa also used information technology for this operation: IBM made a 360/44 computer available to him for scientific applications and a 2688 laser printer (a prototype that then did not go into commercial circulation). The volumes were printed by the magnetic tapes via the computerized filmsetting.[10] The Index Thomisticus was the first great editorial work to be printed with the new technology; for this, it deserves to be recorded in the history of publishing.

In the 80s, the CD-ROM appeared on the market. Father Busa's work consisted of 1.63 billion bytes, which would have required 3 CD-ROMs to hold the work. Though using the right compression algorithms, the Index Thomisticus was contained in only one CD-ROM.[9] In 1989, with the assistance of Piero Slocovich, Father Busa managed to obtain a version of the Index in the form of accessible interactive hypertexts.

In 2005, the work debuted online, sponsored by the Fundación Tomás de Aquino and the Associazione per la Computerizzazione delle Analisi Ermeneutiche Lessicologiche (CAEL, which stands for the Association for the Computerization of Lexicological Hermeneutical Analyses).[11] The design was entrusted to E. Alarcón and E. Bernot, who collaborated with Father Busa. In 2006 the Index Thomisticus Treebank project (directed by Marco Passarotti) started the syntactic annotation of the entire corpus.[12]

The Busa Prize[modifica | modifica wikitesto]

In 1998, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for Computers in the Humanities (ACH) instituted the "Premio Busa" (Busa Prize) that awards distinguished leaders in the field of humanities computing.

  • Robert Busa (from which the prize takes its name, presented in 1998)
  • 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, Kings College London, UK)
  • Willard McCarty (UK) (2013, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA)
  • Helen Agüera (USA) (2016, Kraków, Poland)

Recent Projects[modifica | modifica wikitesto]

Before his death, Busa lectured at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome in the "Aloisianum" Faculty of Philosophy in Gallarate and at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.

He worked on the project Lessico Tomistico Biculturale (LTB, which stands for Bicultural Thomistic Lexicon), which aims at understanding Tommaso d'Aquino's concepts in Latin in the terms of contemporary culture. In parallel with the LTB project, Father Busa was advancing


In parallelo con il progetto LTB, Padre Busa stava promuovendo la ripresa, su una base concettuale differente da quella in uso negli anni '60, delle traduzioni automatiche da una lingua all'altra, con il metodo delle Lingue Disciplinate (LD) con l'obiettivo di rendere praticabile la traduzione automatica di testi (ad esempio, libri di testo) che siano scritti in un sottoassieme "disciplinato" di una lingua, in maniera automatica, da una lingua all'altra.

Telematica e Social Network. Per iniziativa di Francesca Bruni (Art Valley) è stato avviato un dibattito in un gruppo su Facebook, (intitolato Padre Roberto Busa S.J.) a cui hanno aderito numerosi studiosi e docenti di università americane, italiane, tedesche, norvegesi, danesi, olandesi. Gli oltre 100 aderenti provenienti da vari continenti hanno testimoniato della diffusione dell'opera di Busa.

Works[modifica | modifica wikitesto]

  • La terminologia tomistica dell'interiorità. Saggi di metodo per una interpretazione della metafisica della presenza, Milano, Bocca, 1949, pp. 280. This work was his graduating thesis, which inspired the Index Thomisticus as the concept of "interiority" was present in San Tommaso in the form of essere in, and the recurrence of the particle in was not available in some of the concordances dedicated to d'Aquino's works of the time.
  • Index Thomisticus Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Operum Omnium Indices ed concordantiae, Stoccarda, Frommann Holzboog, Stoccarda, 1974-1980, 56 volumes of approximately 1000 pages each (comprising 62550 pages in total). The complete indexing of all of the occurrences of every single word used in San Tommaso's writings. This is Busa's main work, which was made available in CD-ROM form in 1990 and then in DVD form.
  • Totius Latinitatis Lemmata, Milano, Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, 1988, pp XVI+532. A Latin wordlist could be defined with
  • Si potrebbe definire come una "wordlist" (lista di parole) latina con l'indicazione delle caratteristiche di ogni lemma. Le "liste" contenute nel libro sono tre, una in ordine alfabetico regolare, una in ordine alfabetico retrogrado, ovvero di terminazione di ogni parola, e la terza in ordine morfologico, ossia ad esempio, tutte le parole femminili della prima declinazione, seguite da tutte quelle maschili della prima declinazione, etc.
  • Fondamenti di informatica linguistica, Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 1987, pp. 412. Il libro descrive il metodo seguito per realizzare l'Index Thomisticus.
  • Ermeneutica e traduzione [...] un lessico tomistico "biculturale", in Medioevo, Padova, XVIII 1992, pp. 3–20. Compare qui l'idea dell'LTB.
  • Inquisitiones lexicologicae in Indicem thomisticum, Gallarate-Milano, CAEL, 1994, pp. 218. Quest'opera, scritta in latino, con una traduzione inglese a fronte, riporta tutte le statistiche significative che riguardano l'Index Thomisticus, e le considerazioni che hanno portato alla classificazione delle parole di San Tommaso nello stesso Index.
  • - Contiene saggi su argomenti vari, alcuni dei quali comprendono anche materiale autobiografico.
  • Dal computer agli angeli, Castel Bolognese (RA) - Milano, Itaca - BVE, 2000, pp 253. Il libro riprende le lezioni tenute da padre Busa al Politecnico di Milano negli anni immediatamente precedenti.
  • Rovesciando Babele, ossia tornare alle radici di ogni lingua, Milano, Spirali, 2006, pp. 228. Oltre a comunicazioni relative alle Lingue Disciplinate, il volume contiene una bibliografia delle opere di Padre Busa.
  • Il libro dei metodi, CAEL, Gallarate, 1996. Sotto il titolo generale "Il libro dei metodi" sono stati pubblicati fino al 2008 circa una ventina di volumi, tutti a supporto del progetto LTB.

Distinction[modifica | modifica wikitesto]

the Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic - nastrino per uniforme ordinaria
«By the initiative of the President of the Republic.»
— Rome, March 3, 2005.

References[modifica | modifica wikitesto]

  1. ^ IBM100 - IBM100 - Pioneering the computational linguistics - Italy, su web.archive.org. URL consultato l'11 agosto 2011 (archiviato dall'url originale il 27 marzo 2012).
  2. ^ Thomas Nelson Winter, Roberto Busa, S.J., and the Invention of the Machine-Generated Concordance, in DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Faculty Publications, Classics and Religious Studies Department, 1999.
  3. ^ Jeremy Norman, Roberto Busa & IBM Adapt Punched Card Tabulating to Sort Words in a Literary Text: The Origins of Humanities Computing 1949 - 1951, su historyofinformation.com, 15 March 2015 (archiviato il 21 maggio 2019).
  4. ^ a b c Roberto Busa, Quodlibet. Briciole del mio mulino, Milano, Spirali, 1999, pp. 49-52, ISBN 8877705353.
  5. ^ Addio a Padre Busa, pionieredella linguistica sul web, su lastampa.it, 2011 (archiviato il 21 maggio 2019).
  6. ^ Armando Torno, Il gesuita che mise San Tommaso nel pc, in Corriere della Sera, 11 August 2011, p. 39.
  7. ^ Stop the reader, Fr. Busa has died [collegamento interrotto], su L'Osservatore Romano. URL consultato l'11 agosto 2011.
  8. ^ Martino Cervo, Il prete che "inventò" Google grazie alla fede in San Tommaso, in Libero, 28 November 2013.
  9. ^ a b Roberto Busa, Quodlibet. Briciole del mio mulino, Milano, Spirali, 1999, p. 107, ISBN 88-7770-535-3.
  10. ^ Roberto Busa, Quodlibet. Briciole del mio mulino, Milano, Spirali, 1999, p. 106, ISBN 88-7770-535-3.
  11. ^ Index Thomisticus web edition by Eduardo Bernot and Enrique Alarcón English version, su corpusthomisticum.org.. URL consultato il 9 marzo 2019 (archiviato il 21 maggio 2019).
  12. ^ Index Thomisticus Treebank project, su itreebank.marginalia.it.. URL consultato il 9 marzo 2019 (archiviato dall'url originale il 21 maggio 2019).

External Links[modifica | modifica wikitesto]

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