Dennis Duncan: “Index, a history of. Of searching and finding”. – Culture

It stands alone next to the main block of text on the right-hand side of the page and looks like a capital J. But it’s not a letter, it represents the number 1. It’s the first printed page number. It can be found in a sermon by a Carthusian monk from Cologne from 1470. The slightly smudged sign has a major appearance in Dennis Duncan’s book “Index, Eine Geschichte des”. Because it marks a historical turning point. Book printing was still young, less than 20 years old, but the process of standardization was already picking up speed: the book pages became stable, the pagination could be integrated into a reliable navigation system. If you were looking for a specific passage in a book and knew the number of pages, you would not leaf through the pages roughly, but rather pointedly to an exact location.

Book registers are analogue search engines. Dennis Duncan, author, translator and lecturer in the English Department at University College London, shows that they predate the printing press. The index comes from the world of medieval manuscripts. We tend to interpret cultural innovations as effects of new media technologies. That is not the case here. Duncan vividly tells how the register of books arises from the bundling of social energies that push for intensification and acceleration of reading in the monasteries and still young universities.

The first subject index organized the entire universal library according to its inner meaning

The handwritten copy of the book format only had to be enriched. The protagonists of this process, Robert Grosseteste and Hugo von Saint-Cher, live in the 13th century and have in mind preachers in Oxford and Paris who need quick thematic access to books. For them, Robert Grosseteste compiled his “Tabula distinctionum” as the fruit of decades of extensive reading, in which, with the help of the Greek and Roman alphabets and numerous symbols for a multitude of topics, he contains references to passages in the Bible, the writings of the Church Fathers, classics of Greek and Roman antiquity and Arabic authors. It is the first comprehensive subject index, its object being the universal library. It serves to develop them for research purposes.

Hugo von Saint-Cher wrote the first word concordance of the Bible in the monastery of Saint Jacques in Paris together with a group of co-workers. Here the one book is the subject, in more than 10,000 entries in alphabetical order she assigns the recorded words in the Latin Bible to their position in the book, from the exclamation “A” to Zorobabel, a governor of the province of Judea.

The alphabet thus took on a key role as an abstract, purely formal pattern of order. The numbering of the pages, on the other hand, was not stable when the books were copied by hand. The page numbers, also a purely formal element, were embedded in pagination routines when registers were imported from the world of manuscripts into the technology of the printed book. To this day, they are among the visible but inconspicuous tools of orientation in books.

Indexes are made when pagination is established. The interplay of the alphabet and page numbers as a formal ordering system, which forms a “technology of direct access”, is only possible because it takes place in books that you can leaf through. Duncan rightly emphasizes that the codex – “a stack of leaves to be folded and bound at the spine” – is an elementary background to the development of the register. That would not have been the case with the scroll.

Duncan addressed his own book, equipped with an opulent index, less to his professional colleagues, the book historians, than to the general public. He refrains from lengthy discussions about the interplay of Roman and Arabic numerals in indexes to multi-volume works. But he keeps coming back to the difference between concordance and subject index.

It is true for both that they are not committed to the author but to the reader. However, the concordance is strictly bound to the text of the book for which it is written. Every word they contain must also be contained in the book, but the subject index is based on keywords that are not necessarily tied to the wording of the passage they address. If, for example, a Bible commentary lists the story of the prodigal son under the index entry “forgiveness”, the term does not have to appear in the Bible passage itself. The portal figure Grosseteste opens the space of the subject index, the portal figure Hugo von Saint-Cher the space of the concordance. Dennis Duncan is part of the Grosseteste team, and that adds no less to the appeal of his book than the fact that he is a spirited narrator.

Open detailed view

Because, contrary to what its name suggests, the subject index is not solely committed to objectivity. It’s full of keywording decisions, which Duncan points out right at the beginning of Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, with a laconic remark: “The first thing you have to understand is that when you start a Google search, you’re not really looking at the Internet Searches Google’s indexes of the Internet.” Duncan’s book is about smaller search engines, but he pursues the perspective effects inherent in indexes with considerable energy, and encounters a variety of subjective purposes that subject indexes can serve. He tells of scholars who use the subject index to settle accounts with their adversaries. From Whigs among the register makers objecting to the main text on the history of England written by a Tory, from writers such as Lewis Carroll (“Sylvie and Bruno”), Vladimir Nabokov (“Pale Fire”) or JG Ballard (“The Index”) , who use fictitious registers as narrative forms or, like Samuel Richardson, in all seriousness, as a resonance amplifier for the intended effect of his monstrous, multi-volume epistolary novel “Clarissa”.

The boundary between novels, which generally have no index, and non-fiction, which includes an index, is not very stable. Most biographies, John Updike is said to have remarked, are “novels with registers”. When a daily magazine like that Spectator register in the early 18th century, it’s not just a search engine, it’s an appetizer advertising the style practiced here.

Precisely because registers owe their existence to erudition, serious study and working with books, their contribution to saving time when looking for a job is also their Achilles heel. Duncan demonstrates this in a small anthology of polemics against “register scholarship” and the suspicion that the books themselves are no longer read, only the registers. However, its true heroes are not the (usually identifiable) authors of “fake registers” or the prominent writers who work seriously or playfully with registers. His real heroes are the anonymous authors of sophisticated subject indexes, behind which subtle readings of the works are hidden.

Like himself, they are members of the Grosseteste team and make their big appearance when registers enter the digital age. The human-made concordance is easily created digitally as well. The sophisticated subject index is still created by real specialists. “There is a personality in the register, not in a concordance or a search bar.”

To prove this, Duncan has included in his book the beginning of a computer-generated index that includes personal names and subject terms, only to make way for professional index maker Paula Clarke Bain to complete the very ambitious index of the original Index, A History of the”. With gestures like these, Duncan underlines that he understands registering as a form of authorship sui generis, comparable to translation. The German edition comes from Ursel Schäfer as translator of the book and Stefan Brückl as editor of the added one. The last entry in the register can already be recognized as a fake entry because the page number is missing. It reads “Zzz, and off to bed”, followed by the abbreviations PCB, US and SB in square brackets. It should be in Dennis Duncan’s interest that the register makers and the translator have the last word in his book.