Lucarelli, Rita, Joshua Aaron Roberson, and Steve Vinson (eds.) (2023). Ancient Egypt, New Technology: The Present and Future of Computer Visualization, Virtual Reality and Other Digital Humanities in Egyptology

Digital Humanities (DH) and Digital Scholarship (DS) are offering research and
researchers in the humanities endless facilities and tremendously effective tools which have
never been available before. DH/DS methods and tools revolutionize the studies in the
humanities providing innovative perspectives in practically every branch of research and
every field of specialization. The beginning of Digital Humanities is traditionally marked with
the unprecedented endeavor of Robetro Busa (1913–2011), the Italian Jesuit priest, who was
in 1946 embarking in linguistic and literary analysis of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas,
the Italian medieval theologian and philosopher of the 13th century CE. Busa approached IBM
in 1949 with his groundbreaking idea to use computer technology for the text and word
analysis of this huge wealth of medieval Latin texts instead of traditional methods of linear
manual analysis through handwriting. His pioneering computational method resulted in the
1970s in the production of the first version of his entire corpus of Thomas Aquinas’ works,
known as the Index Thomisticus, which was released in printed format of 56 volumes
published between 1974 and 1980. Then, the electronic version of the corpus was produced in
1992 on CD-ROM format, followed, 13 years later, by the first online version of the corpus in
2005, the Corpus Thomisticum1. This was the first attempt by a humanist scholar to automate
research in linguistics in the framework of medieval studies.