The Roberto Busa Award is a joint award of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC),  the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI). It is given every three years to honor outstanding scholarly achievement in humanities computing. The Award is named after Roberto Busa, SJ, who is regarded by many as the founder of the field of humanities computing.

The first award was given to Father Busa himself in 1998. The 2001 prize was awarded to John Burrows, 2004 to Susan Hockey, 2007 to Wilhelm Ott, and 2010 to Joe Raben.

The next Busa Award will be given at the DH conference in 2013. The Award Committee now invites nominations. Nominations may be made by anyone with an interest in humanities computing and neither nominee nor nominator need be a member of ALLC or ACH. Nominators should give some account of the nominee’s work and the reasons it is felt to be an outstanding contribution to the field. A list of bibliographic references to the nominee’s work is desirable. Nominators are welcome to resubmit updated versions of unsuccessful nominations submitted in previous years.

The recipient of the award receives 1000 GBP and is expected to give a keynote or plenary lecture (on a topic of their choice) at the annual Digital Humanities conference. ADHO will host the recipient as a guest of honor for the conference at which the Prize is awarded and the lecture given—this means that all travel, accommodation and subsistence costs of the Prize recipient will be paid by the Association.

Nominations should be emailed to Matthew L. Jockers (Chair of the 2013 Busa Award Committee) mjockers[at] stanford.edu no later than September 1, 2011. The winner of the Award will be announced at the 2012 meeting and awarded at the 2013 meeting.

More information about the award can be found on the ADHO web site: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/awards/BusaPrize