DeBartolo Chair in Liberal Arts and and Professor of Digital Humanities, Department of English, University of South Florida
This is the source
The Jesuit scholar, Roberto Busa, is often called the founder of humanities computing. In fact, starting as early as 1949, he collaborated with IBM to perform experiments using suites of punched-card machines. These punched-card data systems — with their plug-board setups, clacking machinery, and flurries of perforated rectangular cards — were developed for business accounting and tabulating, and adapted for government censuses, defense calculations, archival management, and information processing of all kinds. The first decade of humanities computing can more accurately be described as an era of humanities data processing — in the historically specific and contextually rich sense of the term. This essay describes an ongoing collabroative project that aims to reverse engineer that center in the attempt to understand better this important site in the history of technology and humanities computing.
This essay describes an ongoing collabroative project that aims to reverse engineer that center in the attempt to understand better this important site in the history of technology and humanities computing.
In March 2015 I visited a gated courtyard building on a quiet street in Gallarate,
Italy, the via Galileo Ferraris, no. 2.
Reverse engineering is a method for learning about something by taking it apart. It’s
often applied to lost, secret, or otherwise obscured technologies. You take apart a
device or a component in order to learn how it was put together. It’s a kind of
hands-on conjecture, a way provisionally to While conventional engineering transforms engineering
concepts and models into real parts, in reverse engineering real parts are
transformed into engineering models and concepts
Common in everyday prototyping, design, and manufacture, reverse engineering has also been associated with industrial or state espionage, as a way of modeling classified or proprietary devices or systems. The German Enigma machine of World War II, an electro-mechanical encryption/decryption device, is a famous example. In fact, classic cryptanalysis is itself a form of reverse engineering applied to systems of symbols, but also, as in the case of the Enigma, the machines used to process those symbols. Reverse engineering has affinities with a number of historical and conjectural practices applied to objects and systems obscured by time and whose contexts are lost, for example, textual criticism, which often requires a scholar to fill in gaps left by textual lacunae, lost witnesses, or blotted, foxed, overwritten, or otherwise obscured passages in manuscripts.
The basic concept of reverse engineering is familiar in digital humanities, too, as
part of the field’s emphasis on experiment, making, and prototyping.How Did They Make That?
She says she wanted to
give students a kind of fabricate their own evidence off the page for assembly
— the key phrase being off the page
identify gaps in material culture and prototype the
absences for examination
Reverse engineering is similarly important in media archaeology, which grapples with
gaps, ruptures, and concealed, lost, or forgotten knowledge about media or
platforms. The concept appears explicitly in the work of Wolfgang Ernst to describe
a method of hands-on experimentation, as Jussi Parikka explains: For Ernst media archaeology is not only a way of writing but
a method that has to do with reverse engineering. Hence his way of
approaching objects is not merely as a collector but as an amateur engineer
who opens, checks physically, tests, and experiments to learn how media
function. [In Ernst’s work] Foucault became employed as a technician, and
media archaeology incorporates DIY.
both a method and an aesthetics of
practicing media criticism,
be recognized as a kind of
Media archaeology understood as an analysis of
epistemological configurations (both machinic and logic) does not simply
seek a redemption of forgotten or misread media of the past, nor is it
confined to a reconstruction of the crude beginnings and prehistories of
technical media. Rather than being a nostalgic collection of “dead media” of
the past, assembled in a curiosity cabinet, media archaeology is an
analytical tool, a method of analyzing and presenting aspects of media that
would otherwise escape the discourse of cultural history.
sobering conceptual friction
produced by the method itself
Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair have called for a media-archaeology approach to
the study of Busa’s work, as part of technology development around mainframe and personal
computer text analysis tools, that has largely been forgotten with the
advent of the web
understand how differently data entry, output and interaction
were thought through
in the mainframe era. They have begun to experiment
with software emulations of Busa’s punched cards and their encoding systems,
extrapolating from these to speculate about the workflow into which the cards were
fitted. In fact, details of this most fundamental aspect of Busa’s method remain
obscure.
The point is to grapple with what we don’t know about Busa’s practice, including roads he did not take, technologies from which he turned away but the existence of which still sheds light on what he did. In addition to raising questions about received narratives, media archaeology offers a way to study the component parts of a technological system in analytical detail and as assembled wholes, to construct arguments about the constraints and affordances that come with even apparently insignificant component parts of the system. In the case of Busa’s work, these include for example those iconic punched cards themselves, the key medium for data input, output, and processing. But they also include the printing capabilities of certain IBM machines, and the use of large-scale electronic calculating machines and early computers, and the new medium of magnetic tape, for example, which made for faster sequential processing of linguistic data at later stages, even when that data had originally been punched onto cards. For Busa, the use of punched-card data processing machines and room-sized calculators overlapped — as they did for many users at mid century. Each system must be understood in relational terms, within an environment combining multiple emergent with only partially displaced platforms.
I’ve suggested elsewhere that a useful figure for what’s involved in reverse
engineering technological systems can be found in the
The Busa Archive contains almost one thousand high-quality photos, about eighty of
which specifically represent the center in Gallarate. As I mentioned above, the
building that housed CAAL’s main workspace was demolished by 2012, as Google Earth
and other sources confirm.
This is just one example of the need to take into account social arrangements and
human actors in their physical environments, as cultural archaeologists have always
done.There is much to be gained ... by productively
‘confusing’ media archaeology and archaeology proper
the
heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models
— see
In those terms, what would it mean to reverse engineer the Center for Literary Data Processing as a whole, as a technological system? To begin, we’d have to start with the premise that technology extends beyond machinery to infrastructure and institution, and even to the epistemological conditions, premises, and designs that afford and constrain the system. The archival photographs, for example, show an array of components, beyond machinery and punched cards, including chalk boards, sorting tables, flowcharts and diagrams, floor plan, icons and decorative elements, and human operators. Each component was part of the system but each implies its own contexts, including the global institutional networks that were as important to the center as the IBM machines. In the remaining space of this essay, I’ll use a few of the photographs in the Busa Archive to sketch out some components of that implied system, and suggest how a more thorough application of reverse engineering might proceed.
I start with a personal snapshot, along with two of the archival photographs (a larger selection is visible at http://avc.web.usf.edu/images/RECAAL/): (1) my own snapshot of the exterior of the remaining building at via Galileo Ferraris, 2, taken March 2015, while it was undergoing renovation; (2) an image of IBM machinery’s being crated and removed from the site in 1966 or 1967, as CAAL was closing at that location; and (3) an image of the lab fully equipped and staffed with student operators in their white coats, presumably taken in 1966 in the now-demolished building Figure 1, Figure 3, and Figure 4. So the sequence moves in reverse order, starting with the remnant building in 2015, going back to the moment 48 years earlier when CAAL was decommissioned, and then, perhaps only months before that, to a view of the full configuration of the Literary Data Processing system as if in operation, as it had been in that location for six years.
That last-named photograph of CAAL in operation (Figure 4) can
itself be read as a system diagram. Indeed, the photo was professionally taken and
was likely staged by Father Busa as just such a diagrammatic tableau vivant. It was
taken near the very end of the center in that form, at that location. In the diagram
we see an array of components, from the peculiarities of the physical plant itself,
to the signs and symbols with which it as decorated, to the human operators or
The building at via G. Ferraris, no. 2 was once a textile factory, so it had a long
open-plan interior with a multiply peaked accordion-style roof with skylights to
optimize natural light down on the line. It was donated for Busa’s use (that is,
made available rent free) by a prominent local textile family with some additional
financing from another industrialist. Gallarate had been a center of the textile
industry for generations and Busa adopted the production-line layout for CAAL along
with the building, with grey-metal four-footed IBM punched-card machines instead of
looms and other textile processors. The scientific-industrial management model is
clear in the layout. Textiles gave way to texts, woven fibers were replaced by
skeins of words. It’s even possible that different kinds of punched cards were used
to program Jacquard-style looms there at one time (though I have no evidence of
this). The industrial plan shows in the details: the skylights, the power cables
dropped from the ceiling alongside columns, the rows of small heaters with chimney
pipes, even the open spaces around the edge of the room for worktables, where
textual piecework could be done
That office also resembled a dais or altar. A number of photographs in the Busa Archive commemorate a formal visit by Cardinal Colombo for the inaugural dedication ceremony, and the back wall behind Father Busa’s desk eventually contained a large, colorful stained glass window with electric backlighting depicting a modernist head of Christ. That dominating icon is a reminder of the overarching importance of his Jesuit order and the Catholic church when it came to the conception and mission of CAAL. The decor of the lab reminds us of how industrial and religious cultures combined to create the infrastructure of Busa’s project. In some photographs you can see passages in Greek (one is Romans 11:36, for example) and Hebrew inscribed on the wall on either side of the stained glass window. Perhaps none of this is surprising in the lab of a researcher-priest. But the combination of cultural and industrial influences is important. Those scriptural passages, for example, can be read as religious alternatives to the inspirational workplace mottoes found all over IBM headquarters, the best known of which was the THINK sign, which Busa would have seen displayed everywhere while working in IBM in New York and Milan, including one prominently hung over the desk of the founding CEO, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., when Busa first met him in 1949 to propose the project and secure IBM’s support.
It’s difficult to disentangle the industrial culture of IBM at the historical moment
of its expansion into a global enterprise from the worldwide mission of the Jesuit
order, which included the tradition of founding schools, for example. The student
punched-card operators at CAAL were trained according to the IBM model, certainly,
but many of them came straight from the local Catholic school, and during their
two-year scholarships at CAAL they were required to take Theology and English
classes while receiving hands-on training in data processing. Siegfried Zielinski
has pointed out that the Renaissance Jesuit polymath, Athansius Kircher, S.J.
(1602-1680), exploited a worldwide network of clients and patrons,
and
pursued his scholarship supported by the Jesuits’ international network,
a system of religious faith, knowledge, and politics,
combined with the development of advanced strategies for the mise-en-scène
of their messages, including the invention and construction of the requisite
devices and apparatus
Besides grants from local industrialists, CAAL received some small grants from the
Italian national government. But by far the chief financial support came from IBM.
This flowed from IBM’s newly founded World Trade Corporation but also through IBM
Italia in Milan, in whose borrowed offices Busa had originally started a precursor
to the center in 1954, while solidifying his agreement with IBM. For CAAL, IBM
provided free technical support, as well as the all-important endless supply of
paper punched cards (often called simply
The photos in the Busa Archive sometimes reveal specific models of the machines, or
their nameplates suggest they were trucked in directly from IBM Italia in Milan.
Some show which source texts the operators used for input, and you can sometimes see
the patterns on punched cards as they were passing through the machines. These
machines were of course the key apparatus for the lab’s workflow. They were always
used in suites to process decks of cards in series: punching, copying, sorting,
printing, and collating. It’s of course impossible to tell from the photos every
combination of specific models used over the years — another example of the need for
conjecture and speculation. But they were mostly punched-card machines, starting
with the IBM model 024 and 026 Card Punch (the only difference being that the 026
had the capability to print onto the cards as well as punch holes in them), rather
than large stored-program computers, although some additional processing was done at
the company’s location in New York using the magnetic tape drive of the IBM 705 Data
Processing System, for example. In general, histories of computing have tended to
focus on well known large-scale machines that can be identified as ancestors of
later computers, ENIAC, UNIVAC, and so on. This has led to an underemphasis on
The Busa Archive contains a diagrammatic flowchart for Mechanized Linguistic
Analysis,
as it’s labeled (see http://avc.web.usf.edu/images/RECAAL/). It was produced at IBM in New
York in 1952, presumably for Father Busa’s first big demo in June of that year, nine
years before CAAL was established in Gallarate. Initials at the top
(
SCHOLAR WRITES ENTRY WORD LIST,and in fact the lemmatization of words in the
Despite the language on the flowchart, many of the human tasks at CAAL were
undertaken not by a was interested in women’s ... being able to
do the same tasks as men
— implying that the culture and workflow of CAAL
did not support this ideal
Canestraro was the exception. There’s no evidence that any other women at CAAL held
more senior roles, let alone crossed over to the scholarly side of the center’s
organizational structure, which was located up the road at Father Busa’s Aloisianum
college (named for Saint Aloysius Gonzaga). So there was a two-tiered structure:
technical workers down at the factory, and scholarly or intellectual supervisors up
at the college. Women were the usually invisible or anonymous laborers of all early
computing, and many of the official archival photos are telling in this regard. The
operators sit at the machines with their hands on the keyboards and their heads
down, while suited male conferees or visitors stand around watching the
demonstrations. Along with these photos, the transcripts of Terras's and Nyhan’s
interviews with some of these women give us a more detailed, alternative story to
complicate the received founding narrative
The photos in the Busa Archive reveal CAAL’s odd mid-century aesthetic, a combination
of the industrial and the homemade. Card-file cabinet doors along the side of the
room appear to have been exuberantly hand painted. Abstract shapes drawn high up on
the surrounding walls resemble puzzle pieces whose outlines contain characters from
various languages, some recognizably Hebrew, Roman, or Greek. These may have been
meant to invoke linguistics in general, or the idea of textual fragments, the
partial and incomplete state in which all texts descend to us through history. They
may also represent texts as deliberately
More immediately, I suspect they were meant to invoke the recently unearthed Dead Sea
Scrolls, fragments of which CAAL had started working with at the time (There are
photos in the Busa Archive showing arrays of some of those fragments that look very
much like the drawings). That Dead Sea Scrolls work never resulted in a published
index, due to personal problems on Busa’s part and the various competing interests
in which the primary materials were entangled literary
puzzles
Father Busa saw the work of CAAL as aspiring to a new kind of computerized philology.
Philology is a term that carries a good deal of historical baggage dashed off its English
translations on an automatic printer at the breakneck speed of two and a half
lines per second.
The press release also pointed out that the machine had
interrupted its schedule of calculating rocket trajectories in order to address this
new and strange realm,
as it called it, the human use of words
In the Cold War era, even humanistic research of this kind was likely to be defense
work. At the beginning of the new decade Father Busa personally brokered an
arrangement between the IBM-Georgetown group and both the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission and Euratom (European Atomic Energy Community, founded by treaty of
1957), located in Ispra, about 30 kilometers northwest of Gallarate. Busa later
recalled that he made the connection, as he said,
What Father Busa called the
I’m now collaborating with a team of researchers from four countries with the support of an NEH Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (2017-2019), working with the University of South Florida’s Advanced Visualization Center to create immersive 3D models of the site of Busa’s center and its machinery. These models will be integrated with a range of other materials: Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair are experimenting with emulations of Busa’s process and workflow, as I’ve said, and Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan have already been reconstructing the history of Busa’s female punched-card operators, including conducting interviews with some of them. At the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Marco Passarotti and Paolo Senna are working to digitize primary materials in the Busa Archive. The result of this collaboration will be a kind of virtual lab within which to experiment with reverse engineering the technologies and institutions that made up Busa’s famous (but only dimly understood) center and its work.
Already a more nuanced and detailed understanding of CAAL has begun to emerge, challenging the simple founding narrative of humanities computing and shedding new light on today’s digital humanities and on issues of institutionalization, funding, and labor. Our modeling starts with the minute particulars of material technologies and extends to wider social and historical contexts. The first Center for Literary Data Processing was the product of strategic alliances, pragmatic arrangements, and social connections, as well as available machinery and material infrastructure, all framed by Father Busa’s Jesuit mission, academic notions of the humanities, and models of industrial productivity. Evidence of these system components can be found in the images and other documentation, from the floor plan of the now-demolished former factory, to the arrangement of machines on the floor, to the decks of punched cards flowing through it all by way of combined machine and human agency — including, centrally, but never exclusively and never in isolation, the agency of Father Busa himself. The via G. Ferraris, 2 remains an important site in the history of technology and the humanities, and it’s a site we’ve only just begun to understand.