The concept of text mining was successfully brought to fruition with the Index Thomisticus, an enormous index verborum or concordance of 179 texts centering around the works of Thomas Aquinas: the pioneering 30-year initiative conceptualized in 1946 by Roberto Busa (November 28, 1913 – August 9, 2011) an Italian Jesuit priest (from Gallarate, Italy). In 1949 Busa, in partnership with IBM, started developing (on IBM punch cards) the encoding of Thomas Aquinas’ writings as well as Latin works from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries.
The first published volume of this pioneering large scale humanities computing (an inaugural digital humanities project) appeared in 1974 and the work was complete in 56 printed volumes in 1980.
In 2005 a web-based version of the Index Thomisticus, designed and programmed by E. Alarcón and E. Bernot, in collaboration with Busa appeared online . In 2006 the Index Thomisticus Treebank (directed by Marco Passarotti) started the syntactic annotation of the entire corpus.
Selected Readings: Much has been written about Busa's project and his contribution to the start of the Digital Humanities. This list of readings constitute a very brief overview of this topic.
Biffi, I. (1974). “L'ordinateur au service de la compréhension de S. Thomas: L'Index Thomisticus,” Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale; Louvain 16, (Jan 1, 1974): 152.
Busa, R. (1980). “The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus,” Computers and the Humanities, 14 (2), (Oct., 1980): 83-90.
Friedrich Frommann Verlag [Publisher] (1973). "Index Thomisticus," Computers and Medieval Data Processing - lnformatique et Études Médievales, 3(2): 60-62.
Jeremy Norman’s "Publication of Roberto Busa's Index Thomisticus: Forty Years of Data Processing in the Humanities - 1974 to 1980," (Last updated January 3rd, 2024, Accessed 3/4/24).
Hisette Roland (1977). "Etat de l'Index Thomisticus," Bulletin de Philosophie Medievale, 19: 68.
Judy, Albert G. (1974). "The Index Thomisticus: St. Thomas and IBM," Listening, 9(1): 105-118.
An Historic Research Instrument: The Index Thomisticus," The New Scholasticism, 50(2): 237-249.
Sprokel, Nico (1978). "The Index Thomisticus," Gregorianum, 59(4): 739-750.
Sula, Chris Alen and Heather V Hill (2019). “The Early History of Digital Humanities: An Analysis of Computers and the Humanities (1966–2004) and Literary and Linguistic Computing (1986–2004),” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 34, Issue Supplement 1, December 2019, pp. 190–206.
Revista Humanidades Digitales (RHD) - Peer-reviewed, Open access from 2017. Devoted to research and scholarship in digital editions of texts, digital libraries; digital archives and memory; examination and analysis of multimedia resources; text mining and data mining, stylometry, topic modeling, sentiment analysis; georeferencing, maps, visualization tools ; corpus linguistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) ; digital media, digitization, curatorship and preservation of digital objects. Abstracts are in Spanish and English. Articles are chiefly in Spanish with some articles in English, Portuguese, Italian, and French (Published by Spain's Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia UNED. )
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Vol. 1: 2011. An interdisciplinary journal which includes "Text Mining" as one of its topics for publication.
Jockers, Matthew L. & Ted Underwood (2016) "Text Mining in the Humanities," in S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A New Companion to Digital Humanities (1st ed., pp. 305-320). John Wiley and Sons.
Joo, S., Hootman, J., & Katsurai, M. (2022). "Exploring the Digital Humanities Research Agenda: A text mining approach." Journal of Documentation, 78(4), 853-870.
Truyens, M., & Van Eecke, P. (2014). "Legal Aspects of Text Mining." Computer Law and Security Report, 30(2), 153-170.