The American Society for Indexing held its 2021 Virtual Conference, “Get Your Indexing Shot in the Arm,” on Friday, April 30, 2021 and Saturday, May 1, 2021. Three sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
In the first session on Saturday, The Order of Things: Indexing Then and Now, Michele Combs discussed the history and origins of indexing. Three thousand years elapsed between the invention of the alphabet and its application to information organization. Her presentation described the evolution of books and documents from clay tablets and scrolls to codices, illuminated manuscripts, printed volumes, e-books and web-based publications. She traced the emergence of the modern index in the age of Gutenberg’s printing revolution.
She pointed out that the index can be viewed in three ways: as an object, as a tool, and as an explosive device.
An index as an object contains a list of things in a hierarchy. Indexes, as we know them, required both the invention of the alphabet with a fixed order, and the development of locators and other finding aids for access to specific information within documents. Scrolls, as the first physical books, were awkward to handle and store, and indexes, could only point to a scroll as a single document, and not to a specific location within a scroll. Codices, as collections of individual pages bound into volumes, were the first books that were appropriate for indexing.
In the fifteenth century, the concept of index as tool emerged. The invention of the moveable-type printing press made books accessible to a literate population. Indexes became common features in books, and by the 1800’s, indexes were essential in scholarly works. By the eighteenth-century, the first encyclopedias were mass produced, which included an index.
The idea that anyone should be able to find out anything about everything, led to the concept of the index as explosive device. The index “explodes” the unity of the book as a whole, transforming the author’s linear narrative into discrete bits of information that the reader can then recombine at will, finding his or her own connections.
In the next blog posting I will discuss the second Saturday session of the ASI 2021 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.