Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: The origin of humanities computing is usually dated to 1949, when Father Roberto Busa began working with IBM computers to produce a concordance to the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Hockey). Of course, concordances and indexes long predate electronic computers and, as Geoffrey Rockwell suggests, are premised upon hermeneutical assumptions of coherence and generative rule-bound procedures (Rockwell 211). The index is thus another example

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... "digital" or "hands-on" technology that expands beyond the electronic. Rachel Sagner Buurma's assignment asks students to create an index to Tennyson's In Memoriam or to use an existing index to create a new edition of the poem, foregrounding how informational technologies like the index create, constrain, or complicate the interpretation of literary works.