How It All Got Started
What does an Italian Jesuit priest have to do with the Digital Humanities? A lot, actually. See, there was this Jesuit priest called Roberto Busa who was not only interested in God and the Bible, but also in linguistics and computers. Hey, why not?
So, way back in the 1940s, Busa decided to undertake an analysis of the concept of "presence" in the huge body of works by Thomas Aquinas. Yeah, you know the one: Saint Thomas Aquinas, thank you very much. The problem was that Aquinas was one prolific saint. This dude wrote more than 10 million words—which, folks, is a freakin' lot.
Busa realized that no matter how busy he got, he couldn't possibly get through millions and millions and millions of some medieval saint's words: he needed the help of a machine. He convinced IBM, then just a young company working trying to make it big, to help him undertake a linguistic analysis of Aquinas's work. Lo and behold, the field of Digital Humanities was born.