Father Roberto Busa started the field of digital humanities in 1949 when he set out to create an index of 11 million medieval Latin words. His project required moving truckloads of punch cards across Italy and international collaboration from computer scientists in order to eventually create his printed book in 1979. Compiling this index would most likely have not been achievable without computers, and brought to the digital humanities movement to life, showing how computers could be used for more than just mathematical computations.
I'd like to focus my research on both Busa's research and history, as well as exploring early computing in general and how punch cards work (and how the eventually led to our modern harddrives and RAM). I plan on presenting my research in a narrative form, potentially telling the journey from the perspective of the punch card?