[HN Gopher] The radical power of the book index
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The radical power of the book index
Author : diodorus
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-08-27 04:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I wish this was done for youtube videos. Show me a graphic of the
| scene changes. And let me click into them. So many talking head
| videos with the promise of something towards the end of the
| video, or sometimes even something that is never deliver. Great,
| you redid your backyard into a paradise. Let me see it, and I'll
| be the judge of that. I don't want to fast forward for 30 seconds
| over half hour of talking. Don't waste my time.
| tconfrey wrote:
| I see parallels with the evolution of finding things online.
| Originally Yahoo went with a human curated nested categories
| approach - essentially an index of web pages. It was supplanted
| by AltaVista (and later Google) because automated search was just
| so much more efficient.
|
| OTOH I think a lot of the new Personal Knowledge Management tools
| could be seen as helping you build your own index of the stuff
| you want to keep track of.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _And if we hadn't quite got the message, her entry for "bad
| indexes" tells us to "_ see also _automated indexing." Go to
| "automated indexing," and the two subheadings read "attempts to
| index like a human 254" and "fails 304-7."_
|
| And yet people keep doing it even though it produces an inferior
| result. "Cost," you might say, "is reduced by using a computer,
| and the result good enough that we can get away with it." And
| this is true of many fields where computers have taken over but
| do a worse job, such as music engraving (compare the old masters
| to the default or even moderately tuned output of just about
| anything other than Lilypond and there's a _huge_ difference if
| you're a player; Lilypond, being deliberately designed to do
| better, does better, though it still needs some skill to produce
| truly excellent results) and typesetting of Bibles (readily
| observable in print if you're looking for it and compare Bibles
| over time; and glaringly obvious in Bible _software_ , which is
| uniformly awful for reading, a problem which I'm working on).
| It's not limited to tech, either; in book-binding, for example,
| hot-melt glue is faster and significantly easier for manufacture,
| and so in mass production has entirely supplanted cold glue,
| despite producing a _vastly_ inferior result.
|
| Does this justify a wistful yearning for the days of old when
| hearts were twice as good as gold and twenty times as mellow?
| People on this site are more aware than most of the ubiquity
| through time of this sentiment. But perhaps this time it's
| different? I wonder how many sombre reflectors have thought
| _that_.
|
| Certainly it's not new phenomenon for progress to be tempered by
| inferiority in some regards; further back in history, crossbows
| successfully replaced longbows, again because of a significantly
| reduced time to production despite inferior results--but not _so_
| inferior as to be useless. Progress is littered with such
| compromises. Often those compromises are eventually conquered,
| too: after another couple of centuries, they could make crossbows
| more powerful than longbows had been.
| h2odragon wrote:
| If you haven't read it yet, check out Ben Bova's novel
| "Cyberbooks."
|
| _no one_ cares about bookbinding so its always a treat to see
| it mentioned.
| allenleein wrote:
| Compare the popularity of podcasts, tweets, YouTube, Instagram,
| and TikTok, to blogs and books, to see how rare genuine readers
| are.
| marvindanig wrote:
| You are comparing on-the-web text and conversations with
| downloaded longform artifacts (files) that do not register read
| events like the other smaller resources.
|
| According to some purists, books have not even happened on the
| web yet, and one could argue that a book and a file are not the
| same products to begin with. First principles and all that.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The book index can do some things that full text search can't do,
| it's true. But full-text search can also do a great many things
| the "back of the book" style index can't do, especially when
| quality of back-of-the-book indexes varies highly (generally
| correlated to how much you could spend on paying skilled
| expert(s) to create them, and always has; it's just that
| publishers used to invest more in them, at least sometimes).
|
| If you could only have full-text-search or back-of-the-book
| index, which would you pick?
|
| It doesn't matter, cause you don't have a choice. I disagree with
| article that it "doesn't need saving", if the author meant that
| it's future is secure. The back-of-the-book index is dying, those
| that remain are seldom of much quality. The expertise and skill
| and methodologies of creating manual indexes will soon be lost. I
| am glad some are trying to document the back-of-the-book index as
| a technology, before it's gone.
| marvindanig wrote:
| There are some things that both a book index and even full text
| search cannot solve. For example, if the teacher asks why in
| the Pride and Prejudice does Elizabeth lose temper on Mr.
| Darcy?, those smart-on-the-surface solutions can't take you
| anywhere.
|
| On the other hand my friend from the other school can easily
| tell me to go to page number 432 on the book to find the exact
| answer because labeled pagination has reference accessibility
| [1] along with random access.
|
| [1] https://bubblin.io/blog/referential-accessibility
| HALtheWise wrote:
| I've found myself accomplishing "referential accessibility"
| for ebooks by simply picking out a few words from the start
| of a sentence and asking someone to search for it. Unlike
| page numbers, they are consistent across multiple printings,
| and can point to a specific location much more easily (second
| sentence in the third paragraph on page 231 is terrible).
| Overall, it seems to work reasonably well.
| saimiam wrote:
| Do works of fiction have indexes?
|
| They may have a table of contents with each chapter name sort
| of indexing into events in the book - in which case you'd
| look for a chapter whose name hints at Elizabeth getting
| angry with mr. D'arcy.
|
| Indexes are more suited for facts and figured.
| twic wrote:
| Some do, Pale Fire probably being the most notable:
|
| https://www.theindexer.org/files/20-4/20-4_209.pdf
| [deleted]
| yesenadam wrote:
| I found this awesome Samuel Johnson index in an 1887 edition of
| Boswell:
|
| http://www.adamponting.com/sayings-of-johnson/
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(page generated 2021-08-28 23:02 UTC)