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Bob Rosenberg wrote: > This past weekend at the meeting of the Association for Documentary > Editing, there began an interesting conversation about indexing texts. The > issue is twofold: getting texts to play well together across collections, as > David Seaman says, and giving the user best guidance into the text. > . . .an index, although indeed originally a function of > paper, is in fact a sophisticated tool for using any text, and that having > the same information for an electronic edition is a boon. Sounds like there were some very interesting conversations! Stepping back from the actual specifics or technical difficulties for just a moment, I'd like to consider the question from a reader's point of view. As you say, an index is indeed a sophisticated tool. It allows for a level of abstraction about the text that can be most useful for a scholar using the text. It also allows the author to take an editorial stance about the text, and, in fact can be a quick way for scholars to get an idea of what the author's focus of the text is. (It's also lots of fun for someone like me who, as a cultural historian, mines indices for clues about authors.) On the flip side, an index can also be frustrating for someone who is using the text for purposes outside the author's intention or focus of interest, as they search the index for concepts that think can be gotten from a text but which were not explicitly indexed by the author. Going from a book to an electronic edition raises difficulties with an index because it is going from The text to A text. That is, an index is tied to a specific version of a text, developed by the author/editor of that text for a particular purpose, with certain assumptions about how that text will be used. Electronic texts should be more flexible. As a user of such a text I would prefer to see not An index, but several indices. I would even like to see a sort of meta- or generic indexing solution that allows me to easily create an index of a text or group of texts that reflects the particular concepts I'm researching at that moment. So, yes, an index is very important both as a guide to the text and as a representation of authorial intent. But developing a system that simply duplicates the current paper-based index, while better than no index at all, seems limiting in an electronic environment. > This only allows a happy playtime if other editions use the same procedure, > and we would like to be able to make recommendations. As a general idea when dealing with any electronic-based information, getting people to agree on a particular procedure, both for now and for the future, seems near impossible. Perhaps developing a system whereby indices can play happily together under the assumption that people won't agree on particulars, would be more realistic. Unfortunately, I'm not offering any specifics on how that could actually be done! - Hope ---------------- [log in to unmask] U of Vermont, http://etext.uvm.edu, http://www.uvm.edu/~hag