As a side note, it was only a few years before this (in 1949) that Robert Busa approached IBM's Tom Watson with the idea of using a computer to make a concordance (of the works of Thomas Aquinas). Tom apparently said it was impossible (IBM was a number-crunching business, and parsing huge volumes of text was an entirely new field). Luckily the company's motto at the time was: “What's difficult we can do straight away, the impossible takes a little longer”

The project is noted by many as the beginning of a computational approach to literature.