the Roberto Busa award winners

	Document Contents 2007 2004 2001 1998

2007

	Wilhelm Ott
			. Curriculum Vitae . Publications

Citation for the presentation of the Roberto Busa Award to Wilhelm Ott in June 2007 at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA

In the Foreword to the volume on Book VI of the Aeneid, there appears a sentence which seems to sum up, programmatically, both the capabilities and the potential limits of digital processing:

Electronic data processing can be put into service whenever data of any kind — notably including texts — must be processed according to rules which are unambiguously formulatable and completely formalizable.

[...] The metrical tools set an emphasis which has continued to characterize all of Herr Ott's work throughout his career: computers should serve scholarly purposes, not vice versa. In his discussion of the tables and their preparation, three virtues are seen as particularly important:

• completeness
• reliability
• verifiability

[...] If we are to take responsibility, as humanists, for our use of machines, then it is necessarily now a part of humanities scholarship to understand and develop ways to make machines adapt to the requirements of our work, and (while remaining open to the exploitation of new and unforeseen opportunities) to resist the temptation to adjust our practices to suit the convenience of the machine. In this sense, Wilhelm Ott's decades of work on Tustep have been not only the work of a software developer, but more profoundly the work of a gifted humanist.

It has been the great good fortune of our field to benefit from Wilhelm Ott's work as a scholar. His work has taught a great deal over the years to those wise enough to learn from it.

2004

	Susan Hockey
			. Curriculum Vitae . Publications

2001

	John Burrows
			. Curriculum Vitae . Publications

Citation for the presentation of the Roberto Busa Award to John Burrows in June 2001 at New York, USA

The Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing grant the Roberto Busa Award for 2001 to

John F. Burrows

for exemplary contribution to scholarship in humanities computing. His imaginative application of statistics to the literature of the 17th to the 20th centuries has inspired a generation of colleagues and students. More than anyone else he has bridged the gap between literary criticism and statistics, enriching both areas and making the latter a part of mainstream literary scholarship. In doing so he has helped to put humanities computing on solid ground.

1998

	Father Roberto Busa
			. Biography . Publications

Citation for the first presentation of the Roberto Busa Award to Roberto Busa SJ in July 1998 at Debrecen, Hungary

In recognition of his decades of tireless and effective organizational work, exemplified in the foundation and administration of the Centro Automazione Analisi Linguistica (CAAL), the Associazone per la Computerizzazione delle Analisi Ermeneutiche e Lessicologiche (CAEL), and the Gruppo Interdisciplinare per le Richerche della Computerizzazione dei Segni dell'Espressione (GIRCSE);

in gratitude for the inspiration provided by his example and his encouragement to so many in the field, both directly and through his extensive writings on textual computing and their potential to contribute to a New Philology;

and in honor of the monumental achievement of the Index Thomisticus, the commencement of which is generally regarded as marking the beginning of the field of computing in the humanities, and the completion of which, one of the field's finest results:

the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities have instituted an award for the recognition of outstanding accomplishment in the application of information technology to humanistic research, and have awarded it to

Father Roberto Busa, S.J.

in whose honour the award shall henceforth be known as the Roberto Busa Award.

Given this sixth day of July one thousand nine hundred ninety eight AD, being the twenty-fifth year of the establishment of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the twentieth of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, at the Lajos Kossuth University, in Debrecen, Hungary.