Roberto Busa SJ (1913-2011)

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Father Roberto Busa SJ died on Tuesday, 9 August 2011, at the Aloisianum, the Institute of Gallarate (Varese, Italy). L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, aptly introduced its obituary with the headline: “Stop the reader, Fr. Busa has died”, highlighting his enormous achievements in the area of computer technology : “If you surf the Internet, it is thanks to him. If you jump from one site to another, clicking on links highlighted in blue, it is thanks to him. If you use a pc to write emails and documents, it is thanks to him. If you can read this article, it is thanks to him.” Other obituaries appeared here, here and here. We, who so easily use the online edition of the Corpus Thomisticum and the Index Thomisticus, would do well to recall how this gigantic work started in 1949! Father Busa tells his story in the foreword of A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

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Jörgen Vijgen

DR. JÖRGEN VIJGEN holds academic appointments in Medieval and Thomistic Philosophy at several institutions in the Netherlands. His dissertation, “The status of Eucharistic accidents ‘sine subiecto’: An Historical Trajectory up to Thomas Aquinas and selected reactions,” was written under the direction of Fr. Walter Senner, O.P. at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome, Italy and published in 2013 by Akademie Verlag (now De Gruyter) in Berlin, Germany.