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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: Mapping Words–A Writer on the Mysterious World of Indexing

Saturday, August 5th, 2023

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 fourth session on Friday, Mapping Words: A Writer on the Mysterious World of Indexing, was presented by June Sawyers, who is both a writer and an indexer. She focused her talk on writers who are also indexers, such as Virginia Woolf, as well as the traits writers and indexers need to possess in order to be successful.

Virginia Woolf wrote an index for her book, Orlando, with sub-entries for the character showing cross-dressing and his arch of life. She and her husband started a literary press, Hogarth Press, to publish literary works by friends, and so she wrote indexes for these books.

Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was also a writer and an indexer. He wrote an index for his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno. His entries were humorous and whimsical, she said, with such subject headings as the following:

bed, reasons for never going to
sobriety, extreme inconvenience of

A contemporary writer and indexer is Larry Sweazy, who writes the murder mystery series, which includes See Also Murder.

The traits of a successful writer include:

read quickly and carefully
good communication skills
commitment and perseverance
self-motivation
empathy with the reader
work alone for long periods of time
detail-oriented
good spelling
grammar skills
good organization skills
think theoretically
wide general knowledge
passion for reading
independent

The traits of an indexer are much the same as that of a writer, except that an indexer is usually anonymous. A novel also might take years to write, and an index has a much shorter deadline.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the first Saturday 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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, book indexing, indexers, Virtual Conference, writers
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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: The History of Stoplists

Sunday, July 2nd, 2023

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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, stoplists, stopwords, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: How and When to Hire Someone to Edit or Proofread Your Indexes

Wednesday, June 28th, 2023

The second session on Friday, Another Set of Eyes: How and When to Hire Someone to Edit or Proofread Your Indexes, was presented by Michelle Guiliano. She discussed her relationship with index editor Laurie Hlavaty. Her experience with index edits originated from subcontract work, and with an editor who specialized in scientific and medical texts, then with an indexer who also provides editing and proofreading services. She found that since she was going over and over her indexes before submitting them, that having index evaluations with feedback would be beneficial.

Types of index edits:

indexing skills evaluation with feedback
proofreading
- She said it is helpful to have another set of eyes going over your index.
editing
- This checks structural issues, word choice, metadata, main headings, cross-references, double-posts, and page references. Editing also checks for clarity and conciseness.
proofreading and editing
- She said that this is the ideal situation.
peer reviews vs. index edits
- She said that peer reviews are not a substitute for index edits.

She outlined the downsides–the cost of paying for the index edits, the time working the index edit into your schedule, the time reworking the index after the edit, and the upfront investment. Then she weighed them with the upsides–time of cushion built into indexing schedule, as well as forced distance from index, cost as tax-deductible, efficiency, quality of reader’s perspective, catching mistakes, and improved indexing process, and peace of mind.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, index editing, proofreading, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: Metadata at The New York Times

Sunday, May 7th, 2023

The first session on Friday, Metadata at The New York Times: Organizing and Leveraging News Content from 1851-Today, was presented by Senior Taxonomist Jennifer Parrucci. She showed how The New York Times is ahead of the curve when it comes to metadata and how that legacy has turned into a thorough process for content classification. She also outlined how The Times leverages this metadata to push content to consumers, pull analytics and make sure things are easily findable in the archive.

She explained that clippings of newspaper articles and photos were kept in the Morgue in the basement of the newspaper building. These were pasted to a card and kept in a card catalog to be searched. The New York Times Index, a red reference book, was published from 1913 through 2017. The index includes articles from the first issue in 1851 on. Later, the newspaper could be searched by microfilm or microfiche. Times Tags have been used for The Times website in the present.

Times Tags

Controlled vocabulary based off of the original index terms.
Named entities (over a million) of people, places, organizations, and titles
Subjects ~5,000. These include semantic relations, broad, narrow and related terms and scope notes, and news events.
Assigned to all published assets.
Rule-based software
- Entity extraction: normalization, disambiguation
  - Normalization example of choosing just one spelling for Qaddafi, Muammer el-
  - Disambiguation example of distinguishing between different names: Brown, Michael DeWayne (1954-) by adding certain subject words
- Categorization: frequency, proximity, placement
Do not tag peripheral mentions, figurative language, historical references, spokespersons, people quoted

Tags are used today for Collections/Topics, Daily Email Recommendations for readers, Advertising, Search, and Audience Analytics.

The Archives go back to 1851. The Times Machine is a tool for subscribers that is a digital microfiche, that is searchable and gives a link to buy reprints. She highlighted some challenges with the Archives:

Ambiguous names and clashes in archives.
Offensive and outdated index terms in archives. Need to update, without sanitizing history.
Problem digitizing list with label name as identifier.
Index knowledge passed down as apprenticeship. Problem knowing what something was called without scope notes. For example, Watergate.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the next 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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, archives, metadata, newspaper indexing, The New York Times, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2021 Virtual Conference: Inside the Accidental Indexer

Wednesday, October 6th, 2021

The American Society for Indexing held its 2021 Virtual Conference, “Get Your Indexing Shot in the Arm,” on Friday, April 30, 2021 and Saturday, May 1, 2021. Three sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

In the third session on Saturday, Inside the Accidental Indexer, Nan Badgett discussed the professional, business, and lifestyle issues affecting indexers. Her presentation was an extension of her book, The Accidental Indexer. She said that even if we found ourselves as indexers “accidentally,” as she did, we need to be decidedly deliberate about moving forward to be successful.

She first described marketing strategies, emphasizing the need to determine one’s strengths and how to make oneself stand out. She gave the exercise of creating an elevator speech, writing down “who you are, what you do, and your skills and accomplishments” in a nutshell. Next she suggested creating a list of potential clients and being proactive in contacting them periodically, and deliberately, with emails and holiday cards. A marketing plan encompasses a compelling and unique personal brand: a business name, business cards, a logo, and/or a website.

Time management tips included advice on setting a schedule, tools to keep track of time, and ways to avoid distractions. She also recognized that burnout and anxiety can come from the pressures of meeting deadlines and can adversely affect one’s health. She recommended setting boundaries, eating well, taking breaks, getting exercise, and exploring interests outside of work.

This concludes the blog series on the ASI 2021 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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, marketing, The Accidental Indexer, time management, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2021 Virtual Conference: Embedded Indexing–Tackling the Enigma

Tuesday, September 7th, 2021

In the second session on Saturday, Embedded Indexing: Tackling the Enigma, Devon Thomas and Heather Pendley discussed how embedded indexing differs from back-of-the-book in terms of both book production and indexing processes. They gave examples of several kinds of embedded indexes and an overview of the tools used to create them.

The main differences are as follows:

The files you get are not in final format. Sometimes, there are multiple files (one for each chapter) or normalized files.
The files often need to be checked out and checked back in using a version control system.
When embedding tags, you are working within the system used to produce the book, such as Word, InDesign, or XML-coded text files.
The native system often has limitations on the appearance or structure of the index.
After embedding index tags, you need to use the native system to generate a formatted version of the index.
When editing your index, you should locate the index tags in the source files and edit them one by one. Word and InDesign let you jump to the index tag from the generated index. With text files, you need to open all of the source files in your editor and do a global search.

The presenters emphasized the importance of charging more for embedded indexes, allowing more time to create embedded indexes, and exploring available tools to speed and ease the process.

In the next blog posting I will discuss the third Saturday session of the ASI 2021 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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, embedded indexing, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2021 Virtual Conference: The Order of Things–Indexing Then and Now

Saturday, August 14th, 2021

In the first session on Saturday, The Order of Things: Indexing Then and Now, Michele Combs discussed the history and origins of indexing. Three thousand years elapsed between the invention of the alphabet and its application to information organization. Her presentation described the evolution of books and documents from clay tablets and scrolls to codices, illuminated manuscripts, printed volumes, e-books and web-based publications. She traced the emergence of the modern index in the age of Gutenberg’s printing revolution.

She pointed out that the index can be viewed in three ways: as an object, as a tool, and as an explosive device.

An index as an object contains a list of things in a hierarchy. Indexes, as we know them, required both the invention of the alphabet with a fixed order, and the development of locators and other finding aids for access to specific information within documents. Scrolls, as the first physical books, were awkward to handle and store, and indexes, could only point to a scroll as a single document, and not to a specific location within a scroll. Codices, as collections of individual pages bound into volumes, were the first books that were appropriate for indexing.

In the fifteenth century, the concept of index as tool emerged. The invention of the moveable-type printing press made books accessible to a literate population. Indexes became common features in books, and by the 1800’s, indexes were essential in scholarly works. By the eighteenth-century, the first encyclopedias were mass produced, which included an index.

The idea that anyone should be able to find out anything about everything, led to the concept of the index as explosive device. The index “explodes” the unity of the book as a whole, transforming the author’s linear narrative into discrete bits of information that the reader can then recombine at will, finding his or her own connections.

In the next blog posting I will discuss the second Saturday session of the ASI 2021 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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, book indexing, history of indexing, indexing, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2021 Virtual Conference: Forget the Theme–Mind the Variations

Wednesday, July 7th, 2021

In the third session on Friday, Forget The Theme: Mind the Variations, Daniel Heila presented an informative overview of terms and concepts within historical, theoretical, and biographical musical literature that present challenges to indexing. With a focus on classical music, issues addressed included the following:

Music history
- music era designation and its asynchronous relationship to other arts
- same term, different era, different usage
Music theory
- note value and time signature terminology
- harmonic concepts through history
- instrument families
Music biography (composers)
- division of life of artist, differing approaches
- member of what schools, differing opinions
- name spelling variants

He pointed out that “neoclassical” describes a twentieth-century movement that drew inspiration from the Classical period, while the tendency described as “Romantic” developed at different times in different contexts. An indexer who encounters a term like “Romanticism,” should “mind the variations.”

Discussing music notation, he remarked that the graphic scores by certain twentieth-century composers, in which specific pitches and rhythms are left to the performer’s discretion, were not really a new development. He showed examples of equally unspecified scores from the Renaissance and the dawn of Western music notation in the Middle Ages.

He stressed that the “humble” triad, fundamental to centuries of music and an apparently “simple” building block, should not be taken for granted. He showed how its context and function can enormously complicate its apparent simplicity.

In closing, he brought up the favorite “silent” piece, John Cage’s 4’33”, to illustrate the concept of music as nothing but “organized sound.”

In the next blog posting I will discuss the first Saturday session of the ASI 2021 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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, book indexing, indexing, music, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2021 Virtual Conference: Indexing Without a Client–The Mueller Report

Friday, June 11th, 2021

In the second session on Friday, Peter Rooney and Julia Rooney presented in Socratic-question style, Peter’s work of indexing the Mueller Report. This is the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.

He emphasized the importance of the document and shared his frustration that this historic work did not have an index. He covered the importance of avoiding bias, and the efficiency of using the table of contents for structure, the use of the metatopic, and the glossary for guidance. He discussed the difficulty of indexing redacted sections of the manuscript. Unique categories in the index included events, actions, legal concepts, court cases, and quotes.

The presentation then compared commissioned work with independent work, which is Julia’s area of expertise. She also discussed publishing the index, including venues and formats for the index. A website was created for the index, http://www.MuellerReportIndex.net. Outreach was implemented, including email and mailing campaigns, along with press/media. The index has also been published in print format as a pocket booklet and folio, with possible alternative formats.

In the next blog posting I will discuss the third Friday session of the ASI 2021 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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, indexing, Mueller Report, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2021 Virtual Conference: Maximize Your Data-entry Efficiency!

Monday, May 3rd, 2021

In the first session on Friday, You Can Do It! Maximize Your Data-entry Efficiency!, presenter Connie Binder focused on ways for indexers to increase their speed in order to increase their income, as the more work you can do, the more money you can make. The session explored time-saving data entry tips, including importing lists of terms, as well as using abbreviations/acronyms, macros, indexing software functions, and keyboard shortcuts.

Abbreviations save an incredible amount of time, frustration, keystrokes, and scrolling. In Cindex, you can maintain multiple sets of abbreviations for use on different occasions. Abbreviations in Cindex are case-specific, so she recommends using only lowercase. They are unlimited in Macrex and SKY, where they are called acronyms.

For acronyms she uses the spelled-out form as the main-entry, with a cross-reference from the acronym. She creates an abbreviation with the lowercase version of the acronym that expands to the spelled-out form. That way, she can use the uppercase acronym in subentries.

Macros allow you to combine actions that would normally take multiple keystrokes into a single keystroke combination. She recommends Margaret Berson’s Megabit Macros (https://edit-mb-com/megabit/). Using this program, an indexer can copy and paste data from a PDF into the indexing software, stripping out unwanted formatting and line breaks. An indexer can copy the direct name of a person and paste it into the indexing software in inverted format. Among other possibilities, it may also be used to copy the title of a work and paste into the indexing software in italics with parentheses ready to type in the name of the creator.

Each indexing software has the capability to create macros. Any time you are repeating the same keystrokes, create a macro to do the tedious work for you. Macros can be set up for the following:

Name inversion
Scientific names
Double-post creative works
Copy a record and change the page number to bold for illustrations
Make dates parenthetical
Turn “city in state” into “city, state”

Cindex has up to 10 macros, while Macrex has up to 48 macros, and SKY has up to 26 macros.

In the next blog posting I will discuss the second Friday session of the ASI 2021 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

Tags:abbreviations, American Society for Indexing, book indexing, data-efficiency, indexing, macros, speed, Virtual Conference
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