The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023. Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
The second session on Saturday, Live Indexing Demo, was presented by Shannon Li. Ms. Li indexed live the introduction and first chapter from a scholarly book, The Birth of the Author: Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century by Jeffrey F. Hamburger.
She started by looking up the book’s description on the publisher’s website to get a sense of the metatopic. She copied and pasted this to her indexing program to keep it on the top of her mind as she worked. She flagged a few potential entries in the introduction but said she usually doesn’t get too many there. She used the introduction to gain a sense of the book’s overall structure.
As she delved into Chapter 1, she scanned the section headings, but said they were too vague and likely too general to use as entries. She selected a number of proper names as entries, copying and pasting from the PDF that she had open on the screen. Her dedicated indexing software program was open to the right, so that she could see the progress on the index. She also selected a number of terms, such as authority, authorship, and inspiration, and created subheadings as she worked. Other entries included such headings as author portraits and Rhetoric (personification).
She searched for potential entries in the PDF to see how many times they occurred and if they merited breaking down into subheadings. She flagged entries that needed further attention in different colors: red for reworking and green for possible deletion if short on space. She made notes to herself in brackets, such as double post, reword, or add a cross-reference. She avoided spelling errors by copying and pasting everything directly from the PDF into the indexing software.
In the next blog posting, I will discuss the third Saturday session of the ASI 2023 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.