Indexing Biographies and Other Stories of Human Lives

150 Pages·1.188 MB·English

by  Hazel K. Bell

Indexing Biographies
and Other Stories of Human Lives

Indexing Biographies
and Other Stories of Human Lives
Fourth edition
Hazel K. Bell
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First edition published 1992
Second edition published 1998
Th ird edition published 2004
Th is fourth edition published 2020 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool L69 7ZU, UK
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
Published in partnership with the Society of Indexers
CCooppyyrriigghhtt ©© 22002200 HHaazzeell KK.. BBeellll
Th e right of Hazel K. Bell to be identifi ed as the author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitt ed, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior writt en permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-78962-162-4 (limp)
eISBN 978-1-78962-745-9
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1. Narrative texts and stories of lives 1
‘Soft’ texts 1
The narrative form 2
Sensitive content 3
History 4
Biography 5
Autobiography 8
Political memoirs 9
Diaries 10
Letters 12
2. The great and good 17
Indexing masterpieces 17
Award winners 18
Other good ’uns 24
3. First read your book 29
Analysis and annotation 31
Coverage 33
4. Naming names 35
Alternative forms 35
John Brown, meet John Brown 38
Who are all these people? 38
Errors and inconsistencies 40
Lord, My 41
Pseudonyms 41
Indexing biographies
5. Coming to terms: subheadings 44
Qualities to aim for 46
Language fit for literature 48
And … 49
6. The perils of partiality 51
Don’t show your feelings 51
Putting it nicely 54
Linguistic limitation 55
What-d’you-call-her? 55
The constraint of standardization 58
‘Have you stopped beating your wife …?’ 59
7. All in order: a proper arrangement 60
Alphabetization 60
Subheadings 61
Page order 61
Chronology observed 63
The alphabetical way 66
8. Theme by theme 68
Examples of paragraphed subheadings 69
Tracing the themes 73
9. Mighty main characters 75
Leave it out? 75
Hero-treatment 79
10. The works 85
Listing volumes 85
Titles 85
Characters 88
Letters 89
11. Just mentioning … 90
vi
Contents
12. Presentation and layout 96
Prefatory notes 96
Run-on style 97
Sub-subheadings 98
Indented style 99
Typographical devices 99
13. The user 106
Is that me …? 107
14. Fiction 109
Should fiction be indexed? 109
The indexer as literary critic 111
Indexing the fiction of A. S. Byatt 114
Novels published with indexes 115
References 121
Index 129
vii
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge with thanks permission granted by all the authors
of articles or publishers of indexes quoted herein to reproduce those
passages, and by Peters, Fraser and Dunlop in respect of extracts from
the index to Pepys’ diary.
Excerpts from Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell, copyright
1949 by Harcourt Brace & Company and renewed 1977 by Sonia
Brownell Orwell, reprinted by permission of the publisher, of Mark
Hamilton, the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell
Orwell, and Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.
viii
1. Narrative texts
and stories of lives
‘Soft’ texts
Stories of human lives are recounted in histories, biographies, autobiog-
raphies, diaries – also in fiction; always in narrative form, distinct from
documentary texts. Such stories bring particular problems for indexers,
with regard both to form and content.
The indexer of the humanities – literary or biographical works; books
basically about people and their personal experiences – is often dealing
with accounts of personal relationships and emotions rather than with
documentary facts: what I would call ‘soft texts’, expressed in flexible,
literary language. The indexer of these has to make assessments of the
selection of items to index, and the terms in which to express them, on
the basis of subjective value judgement, being, as Douglas Matthews puts
it, ‘in a sense, an interpreter, not just a reporter of the text’ (Matthews,
personal communication, 1991).
Human lives are generally not lived in accordance with strict
principles, and irregularities in lives that are being indexed must be met
by flexible indexing practice, with index entries selected not uniformly
according to specifiable categories, but by individual degree of signif-
icance, as assessed by the indexer, who is gauging the calibre of references
rather than their kind (Bell, 1991a, b). Each biography tells a unique
story: Alain de Botton refers to ‘the extraordinariness of any life, a
singularity’ (de Botton, 1995).
What I call ‘soft’ texts have been distinguished from documentary
ones previously under other terms. Most largely, they reflect the difference
drawn by Richard Abel between information (dry) and knowledge (soft):
The way in which knowledge, once created, is stored and retrieved
distinguishes this form of intellectual activity from that of the
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Indexing biographies
discovery of information. The latter is readily stored, not only in
journal papers, but also in computer databases. Information can
be stored in these ways due to its discrete, particular, specific
and quantitative qualities. Knowledge, by contrast, is only partly
quantitative. It is discursive, general and broad-ranging with
only very indistinct boundaries. (Abel, 1991)
The narrative form
The narrative (historical) form was differentiated from that of
‘documentary texts’ by Cecelia Wittmann (Wittmann, 1990). By
documentary texts we understand collections of discrete, self-contained
units: articles, essays, lectures, brochures, works, documents in general,
which usually may be indexed item by item. Narrative texts, by contrast,
sustain their threads continuously through the whole work, not broken
into separate units, but extending through entire volumes or sequences of
volumes. Chapter endings are pauses in a continuing story, not changes
of topic. Whole narrative works contain recurrent characters and themes
whose constant development must be kept in mind throughout the
whole, not just dealt with and dismissed from the sequence.
The extended continuity of a complete narrative entails large numbers
of references building up for the major topics, so that subdivision
and specification of many references will become necessary: narrative
indexers must analyse and rephrase their texts closely. Hans Wellisch
describes narrative indexing as ‘providing the user with the context of
an indexed item’ (Wellisch, 1991). These present the indexer of soft texts
with the problem of sustained continuity, the constant development of
characters and themes. Much subdivision and specification will become
necessary, with the devising of appropriate subheadings.
Gordon Carey, the first President of the Society of Indexers, who
compiled the indexes of over sixty books, including the autobiographies
of Lords Attlee, Brabazon, Ismay and Maugham, and a biography of Lord
Haldane, wrote, ‘The compilation of entries loaded with subheadings
is, to my mind, the task that calls for the indexer’s highest skill of all’
(Carey, 1961).
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