“On Indexing: The Birth and Early Development of an Idea” by Giancarlo Abbamonte and the late Craig Kallendorf wasn’t published until after my book went to press, so I was unaware of this excellent article on the intellectual history of indexing until recently, when I was casually looking for new citations to the work of Francis J. Witty, one of the leading scholars on the history of indexing, whom I did cite, and whose work continues to be of value (though I see that the school in which he taught for decades at the Catholic University of America makes no mention of him at all, alas, unlike other schools which memorialize their former faculty emeritus, such as my own alma mater, Syracuse, which I am pleased to say has made a point of remembering long-serving faculty like Antje Lemke with a student book award and a library seminar room in her name.)
“On Indexing” cites Witty, as well as such other well-known scholars in the field as Ann Blair, Alberto Cevolini, Roger Chartier, Anthony Grafton, Bella Haas Weinberg,and Hans Wellisch, whose works were already familiar to me. The focus is on humanists during the medieval and early modern eras, especially their Greek and Roman scholarship, notably the works of Virgil, about which Kallendorf has been an important scholar. (I especially enjoyed his 2007 book on The Aeneid and his argument that “pious Aeneas” was not nearly as revered by all Romans and subsequent writers as I had been led to believe by my Latin teacher in high school!)
What is more relevant to my current interests here, however, is the article’s extension of the three well-known “basic” forms of reading a book (that is, from beginning to end; selectively by section; and as a source from which to memorize formulas, proverbs, maxims, and ready-made expressions) that Chartier has identified as being first described in the prologue to Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina back in 1507. (I did not read La Celestina in my high school Spanish class, however, though I suspect we would have enjoyed it in a good modern edition more than most of the things we did read!)
The authors then include Blair’s notion of “consultative reading” (using an index of some kind to extract items of information with the goal of creating new works) as well as an idea she didn’t mention: “transverse reading” (with the goal of using “the fragments created by the index to tell another story within the original text itself, one that goes sideways in relation to reading linearly from front to back”), an idea which the authors note that in fact has been mentioned in the past by Cevolini and others, but only in passing.
Abbamonte and Kallendorf (2023, p. 496) wrote “Our contention is that indexing facilitated a way of reading in the early modern period that deserves to stand beside the three identified by Rojas and the fourth proposed by Blair, as a challenge to linear reading and one that depends on the availability of an accurate, complete index. This kind of transverse reading merits further study, but that will have to be the subject of another article.”
I will look forward to reading this article when it is published in the future, while continuing to worry in the present about what type of “reading” (and “indexing”) is being done by Google’s algorithms on the massive corpus of books collected during the Google Books project or even by others engaged in similar data extraction efforts using the catalogs of individual publishers, for example, this one at Brill, a publisher of often unique and inordinately expensive monographs in the humanities and social sciences.
The term for this kind of text summarization in machine learning is “extractive,” which has more recently become a pejorative term as used by ecocritical and feminist scholars in referring to the mindless mining of various natural resources with little attention paid to their effects on various communities or to the preservation of these resources over time. The application here to books and other documents is becoming rather apparent, to me at least.
Of course, all this is a useful reminder that times of great change in intellectual history are not always comforting to those who live through them.
Keywords In and Out of Context 