Index Thomisticus

Busa began the project in 1946.^[1] In 1949, IBM agreed to sponsor the project until its completion.^[2] They assigned Paul Tasman, an executive at the company, to work with Busa.^[3] 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.^[2]

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.^[4] This work of punching the text was made between 1950 and 1966. They worked in Gallarate, Italy,^[5][6] and the project peaked in size in 1962 with 70 workers.^[7] After the punching was complete, the data was lemmatised in a semi-automatic process.^[5]

The completed project indexed a total of 10,631,980 words in fifty-six volumes over 70,000 pages—divided into ten volumes of indexes, followed by thirty-one volumes of concordances of Aquinas's works, eight volumes of concordances of related authors, and seven volumes that reprinted the source texts.^[2][8] The seven completely reprinting the source texts were sold separately.^[2] The first volume was published in 1974,^[9] and publication was completed in 1980. The project used a total of 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) of tape ^[10] and it took an estimated 10,000 hours of computer work and 1 million hours of human work to complete.^[3] The Index was released on CD-ROM in 1992 and a website was launched in 2005.^[10]