Julia Flanders has been awarded ADHO’s Roberto Busa Prize.
Julia Flanders has spent over three decades building and sustaining the digital infrastructure that humanities scholarship depends on, most notably as director of the Women Writers Project since 2000. She is a founding editor and, since 2007, editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), one of the field’s flagship journals, shaping its enduring commitment to open access, multilingual publishing, and collaborative scholarly communication. Through DHQ and her leadership roles at ACH, ADHO, and the TEI Consortium, she has helped define the institutional and intellectual foundations of digital humanities as a field. She has also trained hundreds of scholars in text encoding and digital editing through workshops and institutes, extending her influence well beyond her own publications. Taken together, her sustained work as an infrastructure builder, journal editor, teacher, and scholar exemplifies the Busa Prize.
The Roberto Busa Prize is an award of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). It is named in honour of Father Roberto Busa (b. 1913), the first pioneer of humanities computing, who in 1949 began experiments in linguistic automation, with the support of the IBM offices in New York and Milan, as part of his analytical research on the writings of Thomas Aquinas. The computational work was central to the thirty years of research whose published output was the 56-volume Index Thomisticus, completed in 1980. The Busa award is given to recognise outstanding lifetime achievements in the application of information and communications technologies to humanities research. The award is given every three years, alternating with other ADHO awards, such as the Zampolli award.
The members of ADHO’s Constituent Organisations Board and Executive Board join together to congratulate Professor Flanders on this well-deserved distinction.