In 1947, a Bedouin farm boy found a cache of Dead Sea Scrolls while chasing after his goats in a cave near Jordan. It would turn out to be just a portion of the 183 scrolls — comprising 40,000 fragments of 400 documents — thought to contain the oldest known works of the Old Testament and the foundations of Christianity.
Analyzing this trove of content was considered beyond human capability. For starters, the scrolls were in various states of destruction. “Many of them had crumbled into dust, and they had to be assembled in bits and pieces,” Tasman recalled in a 1968 interview. So the team set out to use “the same kind of programming format as we used on the St. Thomas project to artificially reconstruct the text that had been obliterated.”
On the Aquinas project this meant identifying words and searching for repeated usage in the context of others. Tasman spent three months creating software to track word frequency, use and sequence. As difficult as it had been to ascribe meaning to words written a millennium prior, the scrolls project was even more complicated. The texts were a mix of dead and unknown languages: Ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Nabatean. “We didn’t know, in effect, what constituted a word,” Tasman said in a 1968 interview. “I personally worked directly with the padre. I had to teach him, in effect, the IBM machines, and at the same time he was teaching me linguistics.”
Rather than hunting words to fill in what was missing, the team identified groups of letters and analyzed how many times a group appeared in the context of another group. “By doing this, we were able to reconstruct approximately 85% of the obliterated text,” Tasman said.
The method of mechanical indexing, Busa explained, involved 44 steps in all. The only manual work required involved punching, verifying and checking cards in the beginning. The scholars also used mark-sensing, a new technology that allowed for corrections, before printing. Under Busa’s direction, a team at the newly formed literary data processing center in Gallarate prepared punched cards for each word. The cards were then flown to New York, where the complex layers of data — such as the location and order of words; the first letter of both the preceding and following words; and the graphic-semantic word family to which the word belongs — were converted to magnetic tape by the 705. The final alphabetical summary list was produced in Hebrew by the computer’s printing unit.