New insights into the social and gender histories of Digital Humanities: Busa’s Index Thomisticus and its many contributors

The origins of Digital Humanities are usually traced to c. 1949 when Busa, with funding from IBM, began work on his index variorum of some 11 million words of Medieval Latin in the works of St Thomas Aquinas. This talk will give a detailed overview of research that I undertook during a recent visit to the archive of Busa at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. Specifically, I will report on the interviews that we carried out with a number of the female punch card operators who worked for Busa in the 1950s and 1960s. Until this research was undertaken their names and details of their contributions had largely disappeared from the historical record. As well as revealing their otherwise hidden stories I will reflect on how the findings of this project can help to problematize aspects of modern-day Digital Humanities, especially in terms of our evolving understandings of issues like collaboration, gender and definitions of scholarly work.