Almanacco Letterario Bompiani: Elettronica e letteratura (1961) [Italian]

30 June 2014, dusan

An early document from the field of humanities computing, today widely known as digital humanities.

Elettronica e letteratura is the title of the thematic section of an annual literary almanac published by Valentino Bompiani since 1925. The section contains the historical excursions by Rinaldo De Benedetti, Michele Pacifico and Franco Lucentini, and the reports on scientific research sponsored by Olivetti and IBM Italy and conducted by Roberto Busa, Stanislao Valsesia, Carlo Tagliavini, Silvio Ceccato, and Nanni Balestrini.

In one of the articles, the Jesuit priest Roberto Busa, often cited as the pioneer of the field, gives an account of his work on Index Thomisticus, a complete lemmatization of the works of Thomas Aquinas, started in the late 1940s (elsewhere: “During the World War II, between 1941 and 1946, I began to look for machines for the automation of the linguistic analysis of written texts. I found them, in 1949, at IBM in New York City.”).

Included is also a survey about the potential use of computers in literary scholarship (including a response from Pier Paolo Pasolini), entitled “Le due culture” [Two Cultures], and an essay by Umberto Eco.

in Almanacco Letterario Bompiani 1962: Le applicazioni dei calcolatori elettronici alle scienze morali e alla letteratura
Edited by Sergio Morando
Publisher Bompiani, Milan, December 1961
pages 87-188 (of 324)
via P–DPA log

Commentary (Adriano Comai, 1985, in Italian)

PDF (62 MB; large portion of the survey missing, 313ff)

See also an online emulator of Tape Mark 1 and Monoskop page on digital humanities.


2 Responses to “Almanacco Letterario Bompiani: Elettronica e letteratura (1961) [Italian]”

  1. P—DPA on June 30, 2014 3:16 pm

    Nice!

    It might be worth specifying that the missing part of the survey is the general international literary review, with almost no connections to cybernetics + advertisement.

  2. dusan on June 30, 2014 3:36 pm

    There should be more, see note 11 here.

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