Roberto A. Busa idea on Hermeneutic Informatics as deliverd in lecture series of Prof. Valiur Rahaman

While narrating the history of digital humanities, Dr Rahaman discussed problems in global society by technology and protection of human life by technology. He says "Technology serves humanity untill we make technology feel the importance of human values." He goes on quoting further lines from the essay by Busa: He quoted these things

"This third sort of informatics was the first to come into being, with the Index Thomisticus project, in 1949. It brought the following facts to my attention. First, everyone knows how to use his own mother tongue, but no one can know "how", i.e., no one can explain the rules and no one can list all the words of the lexicon that he uses (the active lexicon) nor of that which he understands but never uses (the passive lexicon)".

"What scholar could answer the following questions? How many verbs does he know at least passively? Which and how many of them are always and only transitive? Which and how many of them are always and only intransitive? Which and how many of them are sometimes the one, and sometimes the other, and what is the percentage of each?

Lastly, which contextual situations characteristically mark the transitive or intransitive use of the latter?"

"Second, there is still no scientific grammar of any language that gives, in a systematized form, all the information necessary to program a computer for operations of artificial intelligence that may be currently used on vast quantities of natural texts, at least, e.g., for indexing the key words under which to archive or summarize these texts to achieve "automatic indexing - automatic abstracting.""

"Third, it is thus necessary for the use of informatics to reformulate the traditional morphology, syntax, and lexicon of every language. In fact all grammars have been formed over the centuries by nothing more than sampling. They are not to be revolutionized, abandoned, or destroyed, but subjected to a re-elaboration that is progressive in extent and depth."

The next blog will explain these lines.