Keywords In and Out of Context

One of the reasons that I chose to create this “post-book” blog is to have a place in which I can add important findings of which I was not aware while I was writing Keywords In and Out of Context. This allows me to live la bella vita as a professor emerita, by which I mean following the excellent Italian principle of taking things slowly and enjoying the process, which is, sadly, not the lot of most tenured professors in America these days (and, worse, not the lot of those many doctoral students and other scholars currently working in academe in pursuit of that elusive tenured position, which is rapidly vanishing.)

Anyway, speaking of bella, the work of Bella Hass Weinberg, a fellow professor emerita of library and information science at St. John’s University, is not at all unfamiliar to me, since I’ve been following her publications since I was a doctoral student. Since my interest at that time was in citation indexing, her discovery that Hebrew scholars were employing various forms of citation long before anyone else precipitated an ongoing interest in the history of indexing, which eventually led to my own book on the history of keywords, with several citations to her work in my chapter 5 on religion. As an aside, I should note that Dr. Weinberg is famously busy, so much so that Hazel Bell, a noted indexer herself, wrote of her 10 years ago as “an example of an amazingly high achiever in the world of indexing today . . . Bella Weinberg is quite simply the busiest person I have ever met” (Hazel K. Bell. 2014. “The personality of the indexer.” Indexer 32.4: 149-155).

Dr. Weinberg is still very actively pursuing her own research agenda and her most recent publication in The Indexer is on the history of stoplists. A “stoplist” is the aggregation of a particular corpus’s “stop words” (very common words such as prepositions, which generally don’t form part of an index) which is something that I treated briefly in my chapter 8 in connection with Hans-Peter Luhn‘s invention of computerized indexing.

The received wisdom, as Dr. Weinberg points out, is that Luhn more or less invented the practice of stoplisting since it was necessary for efficient computerized retrieval, but her latest article notes that “Stoplists were thought to have been developed in the 1950s in conjunction with automatic indexing, but the fifteenth-century Hebrew concordance to the Bible, Me’ir Nativ, suggests that they have been in use for much longer. It contains a stoplist that is very similar to modern ones, consisting of function words such as prepositions, and may be the first example of this structure,” since the non-Hebrew concordances of the period lacked them (Weinberg, 2024, p. 61).

She also explains (p. 54) that “The frequency of stopwords in Masoretic notes on the Hebrew Bible is another example of their use that precedes the modern era.” Clearly, these notes were for the use of the human scribes and scholars working with the so-called Masoretic Text starting around 900 C.E.

The Masoretic Text is foundational to the Hebrew Bible (which was also foundational for the Old Testament found in all Christian Protestant Bibles) and it is fascinating that the Masoretic textual traditions were so strong that they have provided the most accurate transmission of any document in history.

I would have cited Dr. Weinberg’s recent article in my chapter 8 where I discuss Luhn’s innovations in computerized indexing had I known about it, so I appreciate the opportunity to acknowledge her scholarship (and to appreciate the fact that she too mentions that trained indexers can be excellent search engine optimization (SEO) professionals, which is a terrific topic for another day!)