Textual Computing

Textual computing broadly refers to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for the analysis, encoding, presentation, or interchange of textual materials, in particular in the areas of scholarship and teaching. The use of computers for the analysis of textual materials goes back to the late 1940s, the earliest days of stored program computing. The pioneer of textual computing is generally acknowledged to be Father Roberto Busa, who worked with IBM on the development of programs for producing lemmatized concordances, laboriously entering texts on punched cards and constructing huge lexical and morphological databases. Early textual computing was largely mechanistic and concerned more with scientific analysis than with imaginative reading. Linguistic applications reliant upon the analysis of large quantities of data were the most popular ...