Page 22 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

tween 1455 to 1500, but measurable more in terms of decades than in terms of sudden disruptive events. Inevitably, disruptive events did occur during the late Middle Ages as they have throughout history, such as outbreaks of plague or, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Protestant Refor- mation. Epidemics impacted society one way, ideas another; the contagion of reform spread by Luther’s prolific publications resulted in the Reforma- tion, impacting religion and society. Yet the rate of disruption, as dramatic as it must have been at the time, seems, at least through the lens of history, to have been less frequent than now. Because most of us are connected by the web, we learn about new developments in information technology and digital books often, experiencing, along with the barrage of available infor- mation, a glut of change disruptive by its almost constant introductions of “new and improved.” But if we step back and look for precedents to rapid change we may find them.
For example, the searchable texts of millions of books is being exploited by scientists and scholars in ways that might not have been imaginable just a few years ago, leading to new approaches to the history of books and librar- ies, including the field of Culturomics emanating from the Cultural Obser- vatory at Harvard. In December 2010 an interdisciplinary group of scientists and scholars from Harvard, MIT, Google, Houghton Mifflin publishers and the Encyclopaedia Britannica published “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books“ in the journal Science. These explorations of astronomically large amounts of digital text were outgrowths, on massively increased scale, of automated textual researches originated by Father Rober- to Busa, with the support of IBM, as early as 1949. To me there is a beautiful irony in having what was later called humanities computing—at the time a radically new approach to scholarship using cutting-edge technology— originated by an Italian Jesuit priest for creation of an index verborum of 11 million words of medieval Latin mainly written by the thirteenth century scholastic philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. Father Busa used innovative technology to understand the past.
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