Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

One should not be surprised that a central interest of computing humanists is tools to manipulate text. For this community, the purpose of digitizing text is to allow the text to be manipulated for scholarly purposes, and text tools provide the mechanisms to support this. Some of the scholarly potential of digitizing a text has been recognized from the earliest days of computing. Father Roberto Busa's work on the Index Thomisticus (which began in the 1940s) involved the indexing of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, and arose out of work for his doctoral thesis when he discovered that he needed to systematically examine the uses of the preposition in. Busa reports that because of this he imagined using “some sort of machinery” that would make it possible. Later, but still relatively early in the history of humanities computing, the writings of John B. Smith recognized some of the special significance of text in digitized form (see a relatively late piece entitled “Computer Criticism”, Smith 1989 ). Indeed, even though computing tools for manipulating text have been with us for many years, we are still in the early stages of understanding the full significance of working with texts electronically. At one time an important text tool that one would have described in an article such as this would have been the word processor. Today, however, the word processor has become ubiquitous ... log in or subscribe to read full text