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 third session on Friday, The History of Stoplists: Lists of Words Not Indexed, was presented by Bella Hass Weinberg, a Professor at St. John’s University. Stoplists (lists of words not indexed) were thought to be developed in the 1950s in conjunction with automatic indexing. The first Hebrew concordance (word index) to the Bible, entitled Me’ir Nativ (15th century), contained a stoplist that is similar to modern ones in that it consists of function words, such as prepositions. Me’ir Nativ was modeled on the Latin Biblical concordance of Arlottus.
Selected words from the Hebrew stoplist of Me’ir Nativ include:
- all lest thus
- already maybe to
- also not under
- because only very
- before or was
- between please what
- but she when
- for that who
- from then why
- he therefore with
- how these
- if this
She discussed theological debates over the meanings of function words and related the concept of stoplist to indexable matter. She also described common terminology for stopwords and stoplists in search engine optimization, computing, and artificial intelligence.
In the next blog posting, I will discuss the following Friday 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.