"Index, A History of" by Dennis Duncan
By Dennis Duncan
Author: Dennis Duncan
Rating: ★★½
I should have loved this book. It featured many of the concepts that define my interests and work and therefore my life:
- Information storage and retrieval
- Card catalogs and extracting meaning from raw token
- Monks speaking Latin in the middle ages
- Philosophers asking what one’s relationship to a topic is when one only sees a index covering a book on that topic
But I didn’t. The main arc was interesting and compelling and would have been fine as a 50 page book, a multi-post long-form article, or a multi-part podcast. In a way oddly similar to The Man from the Future, there was a simple and lovely gem of a story at the heart of the book, but then somehow extensions got tacked on that made me forget about the story I had been enjoying. It was a bit like eating an amazing dinner with wonderful service: glasses refilled, well-chosen wine, witty repartee from the service staff where, after the check was dropped, the staff disappeared for an hour and thereby wouldn’t let us leave. Thus while the first impression was amazing, the last memory was idly shuttling breadcrumbs back and forth on the tablecloth.
By the end, of the book I found up dragging myself across the finish line in a way that I hadn’t expected.
Given that both …Future and this book appeared at a similar point, I’m wondering if editors and publishers are pushing authors to up page counts in a way that mis-serves the authors.
For his part, author Duncan has a fine voice, a sort of chummy NPR-fan you’d meet in an San Francisco bar who’s happy to banter about Kanye’s hermeneutics or better taquerias in the area. His text has humor and insight and clever a-ha moments while he’s in the “gem” of the story. Nevertheless, I felt his luminosity dim as we entered the chapters that felt like tack-ons to the gem (say the last 15%).
The book’s glorious — and apparently insufficiently lengthy for a prestige non-fiction book — calls out some social pressures that urged the creation of the index and some missing technology that prevented the index from rising before the post-Empire / early-Medieval period.
Consider:
- Alphabetic order wasn’t practiced in Roman or Greek society. What was the point when you had a primarily illiterate society conditioned to read whole-real-physical scrolls as the smallest atomic unit? Given this is it any surprise that other tools such as headings, chapters, and even page numbers didn’t exist either? It’s hard to have an index without those technologies in place. Put in your mind a bar or bat mitzvah kid reading a scroll, that’s what reading was up through the early common era!
- Sociologically, scrolls were read as an entire thought: The Acts of the Apostles, the Letter to the Ephesians, The Aeneid
BookScroll 1. Much like is still retained in the Islamic world, memorizing the whole kit-and-caboodle was lauded and practiced
As paper becomes ubiquitous, literacy increases, quarto-size book production becomes scalable, etc. some of the intermediary technologies come along to allow something very powerful noted by Duncan:
It is a truly random-access technology, and as such it relies on a form of the book that can be opened with as much ease in the middle, or at the end, as at the beginning. The codex is the medium in which the index first makes sense
My god, the use of the computer science term “random-access” suddenly lights up
what’s so powerful about the Hash table data structure in programming. By
creating an O(log n) search list (the terms of an index) that points with
O(1) access to a list of unique offsets (“pages”), entirely new uses of the
artifact “book” become available. Books stop being like LP records and become like CD’s where a specific moment can be accessed with relative ease. Want to play the really cool part of a track you like? Seconds. In my lifetime I’ve come to feel that power for the ears; the invention of the index was the same thing for the eyes and mind.
From this intermediary development it becomes possible to create concordances of every letter (very much like the Find menu in a computer, find every occurrence of a textual token) OR, with some human intervention and analysis, create “a subject index, an index of ideas, and as such it is alive to the play of synonyms, able to identify a concept even where the text does not explicitly name it.”
Through this part of the story and the fitful labor of this idea under Hugh Grosseteste (“Big-head Hugh,” presumably for his intellect), I was highly engaged with the simple story and what it unlocked. But then we do a number of tangents that, frankly, didn’t bring much joy.
What happens when moveable type comes? Now the index needs to be re-bondable to the particular medium and particular edition that a particular index appears in. Or what happens when an index writer uses the index to trash the book that’s being indexed? While these considerations are relevant, the narrative here felt far less compelling. Much like Man From the Future, again, I found myself paging forward under obligation without only a trace level of excitement of hoping to find a few tasty morsels along the way.
Of the morsels: there was an exciting reference to Calvino’s Ludmilla and Loteria from his book If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; the explanation of indexing as a business (my early research days included the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature); and a lovely quote from TS Eliot: “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
By this point, I felt like I’d wandered inadvertently away from the story about the Index as technology into a story about some interesting indexes or some interesting businesses about indexes. The thoughtful technological investigation of “How does one get to an Index from first principles” had been lost.
I was hoping that perhaps we’d turn back to new developments in new types of index that I hadn’t considered, but, on my read, it seemed that arc ended at subject indexes and concordances (around the 66% mark) and there wasn’t anything else to say. I was disappointed by that.
I’d say you might be able to get a lot of the value of the book from my highlights below, that is, an index to a book about indexes.
{
"title": "Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age",
"author": "Dennis Duncan",
"highlightCount": 79,
"noteCount": 5,
"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "index has its history, one that, for nearly 800 years, was intimately entwined with a particular form of the book – the codex: the sheaf of pages, folded and bound together at the spine.",
"location": 44,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "A history of the index is really a story about time and knowledge and the relationship between the two.",
"location": 52,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It’s the story of our accelerating need to access information at speed, and of a parallel need for the contents of books to be divisible, discrete, extractable units of knowledge.",
"location": 53,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Robert Collison proposed that, whenever we organize the world around us so that we know where to find things, we are in fact indexing.",
"location": 69,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The index needs to be ordered in a way that its users will recognize, that makes it easy to navigate. This is where the index and the table of contents diverge.",
"location": 89,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the index is an invention of the codex era, and not the age of the scroll. It is a truly random-access technology, and as such it relies on a form of the book that can be opened with as much ease in the middle, or at the end, as at the beginning. The codex is the medium in which the index first makes sense.",
"location": 126,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The ordering of an index is reader-oriented, rather than text-oriented: if you know what you’re looking for, the letters of the alphabet provide a universal, text-independent system in which to look it up.",
"location": 131,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Where Marbeck’s method was meticulously neutral, Round’s is the polar opposite, all personality, all interpretation. Where Marbeck’s concordance was thorough, Round’s index is partial. It would be fair to say that John Marbeck owed his life to the difference between a concordance and a subject index.",
"location": 266,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Part of what will emerge from this story, I hope, will be a defence of the humble subject index, assailed by the concordance’s digital avatar, the search bar.",
"location": 273,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "we will need to delve into its prehistory to get a sense of what a strange, miraculous thing alphabetical order really is:",
"location": 322,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "something we take for granted, but something which appeared, almost out of nowhere, 2,000 years ago; something we use every day, but which a civilization as vast as the Roman Empire could choose to ignore completely",
"location": 323,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "alphabetical ordering is not intuitive.",
"location": 403,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It is a leap into arbitrariness, leaving behind the intrinsic qualities of the material being arranged, turning from content to form, from meaning to spelling.",
"location": 405,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Callimachus, armed with the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, who would bring the sprawling library to heel.",
"location": 455,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In order to identify a scroll without having to unroll it, a small parchment tag – essentially a name label – would be glued to the roll so that it stuck out, displaying the author and title of the work. It was known as a sittybos, or more commonly sillybos",
"location": 493,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "to a Roman, an index meant a label, a name tag for a scroll.",
"location": 511,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The vastness of the Library – ancient Greek Big Data – necessitated a major technological shift: from abecedarium to alphabetical list, from knowing alphabetical order to using it.",
"location": 518,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "something off-the-peg, something arbitrary. The payoff is a system that is universal, one that relies on information that any literate person will know already and that can be applied to anything, breaking it up into more manageable chunks.",
"location": 521,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "By the thirteenth century, the tools for index-making – the codex and alphabetical order – have long been available. The spark that will bring them together will come from two forms of speaking well: teaching and preaching.",
"location": 694,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Grosseteste, naturally, represents the universal. His grand Tabula is an attempt to boil down the whole of knowledge, of the Church Fathers – Augustine, Jerome, Isidore – but also of an older, non-Christian tradition – Aristotle, Ptolemy, Boethius – into a single resource,",
"location": 702,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "a subject index, an index of ideas, and as such it is alive to the play of synonyms, able to identify a concept even where the text does not explicitly name it.",
"location": 705,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It is also, then, a subjective index,",
"location": 706,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "By contrast, another type of index – another way of searching – is more straightforward. Its terms are simply the words of the text under analysis:",
"location": 709,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The idea of the index must be in the aether if two people, hundreds of miles apart, are to chance upon it at the same time.",
"location": 746,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "these features are related to our story. The index, after all, did not arrive alone, but is rather the youngest sibling of a whole family of reading tools that arrived in a flurry in the few decades either side of the beginning of the thirteenth century.",
"location": 762,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "they are all designed to streamline the reading process, to bring a new efficiency to the way we use books.",
"location": 764,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "spiritual reading, at least – as being an activity that sits outside our usual fraught economies of the clock.",
"location": 784,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Augustine remembers noticing the curious way Ambrose would read: ‘his eyes would scan over the pages and his heart would scrutinize their meaning – yet his voice and tongue remained silent’.7",
"location": 805,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "in the principles of accounting and law. A papal decree of 1079 ordered that cathedrals should establish schools for the training of priests,",
"location": 814,
"annotation": "The University"
},
{
"highlight": "University readers would require new tools on the page, new ways of efficiently finding parcels of text – a word, a phrase – amidst the prose block.",
"location": 823,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "textual agility to match that being practised in the universities.",
"location": 828,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Preachers and teachers: the book itself would have to shape up if it was to meet the needs of these new readers.",
"location": 830,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "offer these agile, demanding readers not paths, but something instantaneous, non- linear – wormholes – through the scriptures.",
"location": 832,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Each distinctio is an aide-mémoire, a well-ordered, bite-sized cribsheet on a given theme.",
"location": 896,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "A table of contents, as we saw in the Introduction, respects and reflects the order of the book to come.",
"location": 920,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The index, on the other hand, has nothing to say about orderly reading.",
"location": 922,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "What would happen if we took Peter the Chanter’s distinctio for Abyssus and stripped out the quotations, replacing them with locators telling us where to look them up?",
"location": 926,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "column to the right, to pagan or Arabic writers. A headword and a list of locators. Grosseteste’s Tabula is more than a book index; it is a books index, a subject index that aspires to be as encyclopedic as the mind of its creator.",
"location": 975,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Once the books had been annotated with topic symbols, filling in the index was simply a matter of skimming the margins for each sign in turn and jotting down the references.",
"location": 1004,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It was, rather, an instrument for serious scholarship.",
"location": 1018,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "it will be at St Jacques and under Hugh’s leadership that the first verbal concordance to the Bible will be undertaken.",
"location": 1044,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The friars of St Jacques adopt Langton’s chaptering but supplement it with another innovation, designed to add a further level of granularity. Each chapter is divided into equal sevenths, labelled a to",
"location": 1053,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "With the success of the concordance, the index had entered the mainstream,",
"location": 1124,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "An index is a tool of two ordering systems, a conversion table between the alphabetical order of its entries and the sequential order of the pages.",
"location": 1187,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Lutton, it seems, was unfamiliar with the technology of the book index. He just transcribed the numbers as they were. A perfect copy. Just not a perfect index.",
"location": 1280,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the main table every single locator has been erased: literally scraped off the parchment with a sharp knife by a later reader frustrated at all the broken links.",
"location": 1283,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye would be the first printed book in English.",
"location": 1327,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Mass production brings uniformity. Across a print run, every copy of a work will have not just the same text, but the same layout, the same pagination.",
"location": 1333,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Gessner will also sound a note of caution about how these tools are to be used. In a curious passage, he implies that there is a right and a wrong way to use an index: Because of the carelessness of some who rely only on the indexes . . . and who do not read the complete text of their authors in their proper order and methodically, the quality of those books is in no way being impaired, because the excellence and practicality of things will by no means be diminished or blamed because they have been misused by ignorant or dishonest men.",
"location": 1528,
"annotation": "Those who search engine dip for data to support their bias."
},
{
"highlight": "wrote a whole book in the form of an index, quipping in the preface that he had to write it this way because these days ‘many people read only them’.2 It’s a lovely piece of snark, an arch version of Conrad Gessner’s more plaintive worry, a decade later, that indexes were being ‘misused by ignorant or dishonest men’.",
"location": 1604,
"annotation": "Erasmus Is the actor"
},
{
"highlight": "alarums were being sounded that indexes were taking the place of books, that people didn’t read properly",
"location": 1608,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "for the success, Although particular, shall give a scantling Of good or bad unto the general; And in such indexes, although small pricks To their subsequent volumes, there is seen The baby figure of the giant mass Of things to come at large.",
"location": 1712,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the index has always contained within itself the possibility of being our primary port of entry to a book, and our first sense of its contents.",
"location": 1725,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "table that immediately professes its insufficiency? It’s rather wonderful – it sounds so contemporary, the kind of thing that professors teach their students in introductory Research Skills",
"location": 1799,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the index presents a perfectly sized nook for the deployment of discreet snark.",
"location": 1881,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the index weaponized against its primary text – had become a fashion.",
"location": 1928,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "‘I take Index-hunting after Words and Phrases, to be, next Anagrams and Acrosticks, the lowest Diversion a Man can betake himself to’.",
"location": 2014,
"annotation": "Why hate? If its right, its right?"
},
{
"highlight": "The eighteenth century was gearing up to be what scholars now call the age of print saturation.",
"location": 2402,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "If the Spectator was to be a book it would need an index.",
"location": 2415,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Why, then, was the index to fiction a short-lived phenomenon?",
"location": 2435,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the process, showing us his workings. Indexes are the work of individuals, they are linguistic and therefore human exercises,",
"location": 2497,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It risks taking the index into territory where its precision becomes blurry, its usefulness – the reliability of its headwords – blunted by the weight of interpretation that would go into choosing them.",
"location": 2547,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "fiction, unlike non-fiction, resists being anatomized into discrete nuggets of information.",
"location": 2550,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Not a one-time fiction to be read then laid aside for ever: Johnson has hit exactly on the theme of durability and return that we have seen",
"location": 2659,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Borrowing from a borrower means missing out on the debate altogether. Anyone, it seems, might fall back on a little index learning now and again; but to take it to the second degree is a dang’rous thing.",
"location": 2778,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In the Victorian period, however, it is taken up with a new intensity.",
"location": 2815,
"annotation": "Indexing"
},
{
"highlight": "When it came to the index, however, Migne did not skimp. The Patrologia ’s index – or rather indexes – occupy the final four books of the great series, volumes 218 to 221.",
"location": 2839,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This is the index as modernity itself, shrinking time, making vast distances small. The images of levelling and straightening come straight from the railways: this could be Brunel speaking.",
"location": 2864,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Poole’s Alphabetical Index already contained, in miniature, the project he is orchestrating now,",
"location": 3049,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, still running today, has performed the same function for US publications since 1901.",
"location": 3141,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ T. S. Eliot, ‘Choruses from The Rock’",
"location": 3152,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We don’t want to approve of Lotaria’s methods, but Calvino makes it hard not to suspect that she might be onto something.",
"location": 3182,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The subject index has dominated all but the earliest chapters of this history; by contrast, our twenty-first-century Age of Search is, in effect, an age of the automated concordance.",
"location": 3205,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "for 700 years, from St Hugh to Virginia Woolf, a final index was necessarily a second version.",
"location": 3289,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It merely swapped one type of paper card for another.",
"location": 3360,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We have opened up the possibility of reordering without rewriting.",
"location": 3362,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "When the publicity team for the singer Susan Boyle decided to promote the launch of her 2012 album Standing Ovation under the hashtag #susanalbumparty, there was no registration panel to point out that this sequence of letters could be read in different ways,",
"location": 3513,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "A good index can be a pleasure of its own; but a good index can only be the product of a good indexer.",
"location": 3547,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "A good subject index can only be the product of a good indexer, an expert reader who knows something about the topic in hand",
"location": 3566,
"annotation": ""
}
]
}