Index and Search

In Chapter 3 of Too Much To Know, Ann Blair covers in detail different reference genres. (Previous posts: Chapter 1, Chapter 2). What I found most interesting was the history and use of the index. Blair sums up the situation:

“By the eighteenth century the index was a tool so common that it was taken for granted and manipulated in new ways. In 1749 Denis Diderot used the index to name an author whom he dared not name in the text because the author was known as unorthodox and would have caught the eye of the censors. Censors were apparently less alert to paratextual elements than modern scholars or savvy contemporary readers – errata could be used similarly to plant terms that censors would otherwise have banned. ‘Index learning’ became a term of contempt (coined by Jonathan Swift), and by the eighteenth century some authors explicitly refused to index their works lest readers fail to read the text through. These new concerns about the index attest to its prominent place among the methods of reading in the eighteenth century.”

Three things jump to mind.

First, I wouldn’t have conceived using the index or endnotes to ‘hide’ information from a censor or editor. That’s clever. I suppose it’s a good thing that censorship has (in some ways) decreased significantly compared to the eighteenth century. As a modern comparison, proofreading of chemistry textbooks comes to mind – errors in the end-of-chapter questions outnumber those in the main text. Worse are errors in solutions manuals to those end-of-chapter questions. Even worse are students trying to pass off their work by copying the wrong answers.

Second, I had not heard of ‘index learning’. Sounds like a skimming technique before there were Cliff’s Notes or other written summaries. If anything, I find that my students today don’t know how to use the index in their chemistry textbook. Office hours can be frustrating (for both me and the student) if the student hasn’t cracked open their textbook, or at best has only taken a cursory glance. Many are unaware that there is an index. They’re also more likely to do a Google search rather than use the index. A Google search in some way resembles an index. It’s just not a static alphabetical index in a single book, but rather a dynamic index of the digital ‘book containing all books’.

Third, I started to ponder why the book index is alphabetical. At first glance, that makes it easy to find what you’re looking for – assuming you’ve memorized your ABCs in the conventional order. But in medieval times, indices might be alphabetical or they might be topical. There’s a logic to the topical system – things that are related are found together. On the other hand, an alphabetical list is simply a list; aardvark and aborigine might not be connected topically in said book. Our modern version of topic-linking indices are the hyperlinks found in webpages. Think Wikipedia, our modern encyclopedia. No need to turn to the back page or even search. Just click! A very early forerunner might be the branching diagrams used in reference genres. (Shown below is a page from Polyanthea, and yes I found it on WikiCommons.)

What allows quick searching (and also facile reproduction) is atomization. That’s how a chemist thinks about it – you might call it digitization. The alphabet is basically a set of digits. That’s why you can quickly search an alphabetic index. The power of internet search leverages data in digital or atomized form. In the raw-est form of data, binary code, the digits are simply 0 and 1. Nothing in between. (Actual computer chip operation forces an analog into digital modes.) Reminds me of quantized energy levels of an atom. An electron can be in this energy state or that energy state but nothing in between. Not sure how that helps search, but somehow the electrons ‘know’ what to do. Chemists have even ‘reduced’ molecular structures into digital form, for quick searching and easy indexing. I use the NIST WebBook regularly in my research. You can plug in a chemical formula and out pop a bunch of structures – isomers, actually: molecules with the same chemical formula but with different chemical structures. The discovery of isomers is a fascinating tale in itself, for a future blogpost!

Random thought: I hyperlink back to previous posts but I don’t edit an old post to hyperlink forward to a relevant post. That’s sort of a one-way index. Maybe I need to remedy this. But I’m too lazy. Anyway, blogger has a search function.