The radical power of the book index
prospectmagazine.co.uk
prospectmagazine.co.uk
And yet people keep doing it even though it produces an inferior result. “Cost,” you might say, “is reduced by using a computer, and the result good enough that we can get away with it.” And this is true of many fields where computers have taken over but do a worse job, such as music engraving (compare the old masters to the default or even moderately tuned output of just about anything other than Lilypond and there’s a huge difference if you’re a player; Lilypond, being deliberately designed to do better, does better, though it still needs some skill to produce truly excellent results) and typesetting of Bibles (readily observable in print if you’re looking for it and compare Bibles over time; and glaringly obvious in Bible software, which is uniformly awful for reading, a problem which I’m working on). It’s not limited to tech, either; in book-binding, for example, hot-melt glue is faster and significantly easier for manufacture, and so in mass production has entirely supplanted cold glue, despite producing a vastly inferior result.
Does this justify a wistful yearning for the days of old when hearts were twice as good as gold and twenty times as mellow? People on this site are more aware than most of the ubiquity through time of this sentiment. But perhaps this time it’s different? I wonder how many sombre reflectors have thought that.
Certainly it’s not new phenomenon for progress to be tempered by inferiority in some regards; further back in history, crossbows successfully replaced longbows, again because of a significantly reduced time to production despite inferior results—but not so inferior as to be useless. Progress is littered with such compromises. Often those compromises are eventually conquered, too: after another couple of centuries, they could make crossbows more powerful than longbows had been.
no one cares about bookbinding so its always a treat to see it mentioned.
If you could only have full-text-search or back-of-the-book index, which would you pick?
It doesn't matter, cause you don't have a choice. I disagree with article that it "doesn't need saving", if the author meant that it's future is secure. The back-of-the-book index is dying, those that remain are seldom of much quality. The expertise and skill and methodologies of creating manual indexes will soon be lost. I am glad some are trying to document the back-of-the-book index as a technology, before it's gone.
On the other hand my friend from the other school can easily tell me to go to page number 432 on the book to find the exact answer because labeled pagination has reference accessibility [1] along with random access.
They may have a table of contents with each chapter name sort of indexing into events in the book - in which case you’d look for a chapter whose name hints at Elizabeth getting angry with mr. D’arcy.
Indexes are more suited for facts and figured.
As an aside, i learnt from reading this that his name is Nabokov, not Nabakov!
According to some purists, books have not even happened on the web yet, and one could argue that a book and a file are not the same products to begin with. First principles and all that.
OTOH I think a lot of the new Personal Knowledge Management tools could be seen as helping you build your own index of the stuff you want to keep track of.