Indexes/Indices

Censura Posts : 1515 Join date : 2012-01-09

I have just read a book called Index: a history of by Dennis Duncan (sorry about the changes in font: I have copied bits from various other sites - the first one is from me on a Reading message board. It was rather esoteric for my understanding and the literary feuds were quite convoluted.

Index is a very modern book and being non-fiction it shows more. One paragraph (or part thereof) says, ' When Donald Trump tweets that 'Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives...[sic] They are controlling what we can & cannot see", he is only - inadvertently - dragging an ancient paranoia into the digital age, the twenty-first-century Republican version of Macauley's "Let no damned Tory index my History." The search engine, it should be noted, was soon exonerated. But as we move into the present, tracking the entry of computing into the practice of indexing, it seems that a complex of old doubts - about reading and attention, effort and convenience, direct and mediated experience - are closer to the surface now that they have been for centuries.
From the Penguin site: Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. Here we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. This is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Here, for the first time, its story is told.
Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and - of course - indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart, and we have been for eight hundred years.

Censura Posts : 1515 Join date : 2012-01-09

I meant to add that indexes (which I want to call indices) have been used over the centuries as a matter of settling scores and could be used as part of feuds. He goes into considerable detail about some of the ways indexes were used in on-going feuds. Not just as I use them to see if there is any mention of New Zealand in them (there wasn't in this detailed index, but it did somewhere mention the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers.

Subject: Re: Indexes/Indices Wed 23 Nov 2022, 08:54

Caro, I haven’t done any sleuthing on the internet – I’ve always used ‘indices’ for the power by which a number is multiplied by itself ‘two to the power of two’ (two squared) 2²or ‘two to the power of 3’ (two cubed) 2³ and have used ‘indexes’ as a plural of ‘index’ as in a book. I’m not sure what the grammatical rule is (if there is one) to be honest.

Similarly, I had no idea that indexes could provide fuel for those who wish to be contentious. Is the Macauley referred Thomas Babington M.............. or the Irish historian Martin Mccauley? (Hope my spellings are correct). I went to a very old-fashioned school and among the historians whose books were referred when I was in 6th form were Thomas Babington Macaulay and Edward John Trelawny. Hint: we weren't studying 20th century history.

Censura Posts : 1515 Join date : 2012-01-09

Thomas Babington. I don't seem to know how I have heard of him: we did do history at school and a year of it at university. (I was invited to do honours in it, but chose English instead.) He just seems to be one of those names I know without knowing how.