Index Thomisticus
digital humanities project
The Index Thomisticus was a digital humanities project begun in the 1940s that created a concordance to 179 texts centering around Thomas Aquinas. Led by Roberto Busa, the project indexed 10,631,980 words over the course of 34 years, initially onto punched cards. It is considered a pioneering project in the field of digital humanities.
Project
Busa began the project in 1946. In 1949, IBM agreed to sponsor the project until its completion. They assigned Paul Tasman, an executive at the company, to work with Busa. Busa selected 179 texts centering around Thomas Aquinas that would be put into a form that was machine-readable. 118 of the works were written by Aquinas, and the remaining 61 items were either at one point mis-attributed to him or an attempt to complete an unfinished work begun by Aquinas.
A significant part of the project was the data entry, which was meticulously carried out by a team of female keypunch operators. Their dedication and precision were instrumental in the success of the project.
The public source identifies “Index Thomisticus” as digital humanities project. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Index, Thomisticus and digital.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104830342. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1946 and 1949.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Index Thomisticus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.