And in reading about Duncan's book I find myself interested enough in the topic of indices that the existence of a whole book on the concept and its history does not seem at all amiss. My only delay in adding it to my reading stack is that it does not seem as though it will be in print in the states until February. You may find my response to that injustice under the heading "Cursing, caused by U.S. publishing dates, later than British."
Back in one of my technical writing jobs, I was the index guy. Our users, librarians, absolutely insisted that the manuals needed good indexes, so I read a book on it and was the guy responsible for creating the indexes for all the documentation.
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit of a puzzle to try to guess what words the user will look for to make sure they're included and not make a mere concordance.
It's clearly one of those onion-style phenomena where you find layers and layers to what seemed to be a simple idea. I'm always intrigued by the development of basic concepts we take for granted. Joseph Mazur's "Enlightening Symbols" tells us where things like the plus and minus signs, as well as numerals themselves, came from and despite my math deficiencies I gobbled it up. So the history of the index was bait I couldn't pass up.
ReplyDeleteAre you familiar with the books that Isaac Asimov did in that line? I really liked Realm of Numbers and have a number of other popular science explainers from him on my shelves to get to someday.
ReplyDeleteI read most of them once upon a time and still have Asimov on Numbers. He's probably the reason I passed my science courses with a C instead of a D.
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