Busa on textual informatics as explained by Dr. Valiur Rahaman, Professor of English and Digital Humanities, LPU

At the time of explaining the history of digital humanities, Prof. Rahaman interpreted problems in global society raised by the failure of technologies and solutions to the problems like safety security, discrimination, prevention of suicide and the role of technology as a digital saviour. He says, 'Technology serves humanity when we make technology feel or experience the importance of human values and culture.' (2023 LPU) He goes on to quote from the lines from the essay Busa. The next blog will explain these lines.

The second perspective is textual informatics, and it has branched into three different currents. Today the two greater and richer ones must be clearly distinguished from the third, the smallest and poorest. I must say that many people still do not realize this. I call the first current "documentaristic" or "documentary", in memory of the American Documentation Society, and of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation in the 1950s. It includes databanks, the Internet, and the World Wide Web, which today are the infrastructures of telecommunications and are in continuous ferment. The second current I call "editorial." This is represented by CDs and their successors, including the multimedia ones, a new form of reproduction of a book, with audio-visual additions. Both these, albeit in different ways, provide for the multiplication, distribution, and swift traceability of both information and of text. Both are recognizable by the fact that they substantially transfer and present, on an electronic support system, words and punctuation plus some operative commands. Because they provide a service and have a quick return on investment, both have grown abundantly – the first, despite significant obstacles, more solidly and with fewer disappointments than the second.

I call the third current "hermeneutic" or interpretative, that informatics is most associated with linguistic analysis and which I would describe as follows. In the electronic Index Thomisticus, each of the 11 million words is encapsulated in a record of 152 bytes. Some 22 are reserved for the word, and 130 contain 300 alternating "internal hypertexts", which specify the values within the levels of the morphology.

At the moment, I am trying to get another project underway, which will obviously be posthumous, the first steps of which will consist of adding to the morphological encoding of every single separate word of the Thomistic lexicon (in all there are 150,000, including all the particles, such as et, non, etc.), the codes that express its syntax (i.e., its direct elementary syntactic correlations) within every single phrase in which it occurs. This project is called Lessico Tomistico Biculturale (LTB). Only a computer census of the syntactic correlations can document what concepts the author wanted to express with that word. Of a list of syntactic correlations, the "conceptual" translation can thus be given in modern languages. I have already published, mainly in the series of the Lessico Intellectuale Europeo (directed by T. Gregory of the University of Rome), the results of such syntactical analysis of a dozen words in their more than 500,000 context lines. To give one example, in the mind of St. Thomas ratio seminalis meant what today we call a genetic programme. Obviously, St Thomas did not know of either DNA or genes, because at the time microscopes did not exist, but he had well understood that something had to perform their functions.