How Ancient Religious Texts Went Digital
In the 1940s, as the Italian Jesuit priest Father Roberto Busa studied “the verbal system” of Thomas Aquinas, he wondered if, perhaps, there was “any gadget” that could help him develop a concordance—an alphabetical listing of all words written by the 13th century philosopher saint, complete with conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and their citations. In 1949,…
