Marinella Testori is a Digital Humanist with specialism in linguistic annotation and lexicography for Latin. Since 2010 she has been collaborating as Linguistic Annotator of the Index Thomisticus Treebank Project (http://itreebank.marginalia.it/), and since 2017 as Lexicographer at the CIRCSE (Catholic University of Milan, Italy). She received two MM.AA. in Humanities and Historical Sciences at the Catholic University of Milan, a Biblical Diploma at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, and a postgraduate degree in Text Informatics and Digital Scholarly Edition at the University of Arezzo-Siena (Italy). She is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation regarding corpus linguistics methods applied to the language of Thomas Aquinas at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.
This is the source
Despite being also known as the Father of Digital Humanities
owing to his
pioneering contribution to the application of informatics to the whole ensemble
of texts by the medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274),
the Jesuit Italian priest Roberto Busa (1913-2011) has still not been fully
appreciated with regard to his development of a hermeneutic informatics
hermeneutics
is explained by Busa in terms of language
dynamisms potentially leading to the development of what Johanna Drucker has
described as a humanistic-informed theory of the
making of technology
Studies the impact of Roberto Busa's interpretation of informatics on DH.
In his article titled
as a practice of representation
humanities computing as a way of reasoningand
humanities computing as shaped by the need for human communication. The basis for these suggestions outlined in 2002 may be found in the article
a set of ontological commitments,
a medium for efficient computationand
a medium of human expression
It is worth noticing that, with their discussion, Davis and colleagues have anticipated the current debates regarding what digital humanities is and, more specifically, the boundary between a generic, widespread use of computers to do things, and computer applications adding value to academic research in humanistic disciplines because of their capability of representing human knowledge more effectively. Interestingly, in the second half of the twentieth century Roberto Busa (1913-2011), the groundbreaking developer of the
In this article, I am going to outline the salient ideas put into practice by Busa by
discussing some of his contributions as a common thread. It is not a coincidence
that in 1998 Busa admonished that Informatics is already an ocean
In his keynote speech
documentaristicinformatics, comprising all the informatic services allowing efficient
information retrieval;
editorialinformatics, referring to the wide range of
multimediadevices for reading books, watching films, browsing the Internet; and
hermeneutic informatics, considering the
computerized text analysis, or language hermeneutics, i.e. interpretation, […] of all our ways of questioning thewhysof language
the computer allows and exigently demands, as its specific capacities, an exhaustive, detailed, deep, quantitative knowledge, derived from huge amounts of natural texts
human expressions
language that [is] unknown
Language that unknownis a literal translation from Italian. The meaning is that, generally, we do not have a full, conscious awareness of the language in all its components.
new qualitative dimensions
can help us to be more humanistic than before
the understanding of underlying theoretical claims is thesine qua non of humanistic enquiry
underlying theoretical claimsprimarily involve language dynamisms and linguistic issues. More specifically, these underlying implications concern the meaning, the
semanticsof words and sentences, which is not attainable by a mere quantitative production of a certain amount of data. Busa claimed that
we do not speak in words but in sentences. A sentence has a global meaning which is not the pure sum of the values of its single components. The heart of this problem is whether we are able to formalise the global meaning of sentences with something less than the whole sentence itself; in other words, whether we can succeed in identifying in each sentence something which can be taken as characteristic of its global meaning
According to Busa’s experience, a high-quality methodology in computing for the
humanities should be focused on an accurate reflection on communication, because
man and computer interact with the help of sophisticated languages which differ
from common grammar and syntax and require constant development. Charles L.
Isbell et al. have confirmed the language-oriented nature of the interaction
established by human beings with the machine and suggested a reciprocal
shaping-power of the language on the outside reality (the computer) and,
The computing machine or artifact is
typically manipulated through some language that provides a combination
of symbolic representation of the features, objects, and states of
interest as well as a visualization of transformations and interactions
that can be directly compared and aligned with those in the world. The
centrality of the machine makes computing models inherently executable
or automatically manipulable and, in part, distinguishes computing from
mathematics. Therefore, the computationalist acts as an intermediary
between models, machines, and languages and prescribes objects, states,
and processes
.the challenge is to shift
humanistic study from attention to the
informed theory of the
cannot elude a renewed,
unremitting consideration of language features and issues, which, in a kind of
virtuous circle, are positively related to the hermeneutic informatics
to
which Busa referred in his last keynote speech
This type of theoretical approach, along with the scepticism Busa expressed
regarding possibilities for a machine to fully develop it Language is living, open and continually
evolving. It is in tune with everything that is beautiful and new.
Consequently, the epistemological methodologies of mathematical and
physical sciences, which measure quantifiable physical entities, are not
sufficient to dominate and grasp the logic of the signs we use to
communicate knowledge
.the computer has even improved the
quality of methods in philological analysis, because its brute physical
rigidity demands full accuracy, full completeness, full
systematicity
Busa found in the so-called Porphyrian tree
, suggested by the ancient philosopher Porphyry to
explain the Aristotelian
Porphyrian Treesee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyrian_tree . See also what is proposed about
Transcendentals and Predicationin
treeswhich constitute a treebank, a linguistic corpus characterised by a specific focus on the relationships between words and sentences. Busa was aware of the difference among the
Porphyrian trees, expressing
a graduated scalarity of similarities and differences
scalarityappears in the original text, but the most proper term here would be
scale.
treebanks, illustrating
relations of real and true dependency
a syntax extracted inductively from computerised texts and workable by the computer according to its boundless capacities
Dependency trees are very useful and very educative. They train us in an internal.speleologyon our own logic, which in each of us is the spiritual centre of our own personal consistency and dignity.Knowing yourselfis a process that is never really exhausted
Building a treebank for the syntactic and semantic annotation of the 11 million words constituting the
making of language,to recall the title of the book by Mike Beaken,
Language-based models of interpreting and building a language, along with the
development of new technologies in the field of computing applied to the
humanities, may represent theoretically and practically valid methods of
contributing to the above-quoted challenges explained by Unsworth and Davis.
Despite being software-embedded, in fact, these models and related technologies
may be able to overcome the inherent limitations (e.g., strong
object-orientation) of mere computational approaches not capturing the
performative value of human acts of linguistic expression. In addition, owing to
our language-shaped minds, they may offer a remedy to that universal lament about the
fragmentation of knowledge
the human hunger for syntheses
derived from microanalysis, continues to surge up, and not only in
technologies, but also in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and
theology