Fall has definitely arrived here in Edmonton. Leaves are turning a beautiful golden yellow and the temperature at night is starting to dip below freezing. This year this also seems to be the season for an uptick in queries to index academic books, most of them ready for indexing in… Read More »When Potential Clients Ghost Me
Last time I wrote about reading like an indexer and what it is I do and look for when reading a text and writing the rough draft of an index. Today I’d like to reflect on my editing process. A few months ago I started tracking my time when I… Read More »My Index Editing Process
So you are sitting down to write an index. You scroll to the first page in the PDF, or, if you’ve printed out the proofs, you place the first page on the desk in front of you, and then…what? What is your thought process? How do you decide what entries… Read More »Reading Like an Indexer
Today’s reflection is in response to a question I received through the feedback survey for my newsletter, Indexing Matters. Thank you very much for your question, and my thanks to everyone who took the time to provide feedback. Your thoughtful responses are very encouraging and have given me good ideas… Read More »One Index or Multiple?
No surprise, publishing continues to react and interact with artificial intelligence. A couple of colleagues recently raised AI on a couple of indexing email lists. I get the sense that many indexers are concerned about the potential for AI to replace us, or at least that publishers will believe that… Read More »Is AI Indexing Nearly Here?
My book is one year old! Well, close enough to a full year. The official one year mark is July 11, two days from now. I feel like this anniversary has snuck up on me. Sales for Book Indexing: A Step-by-Step Guide have slowed over the last few months, but… Read More »One Year Book Birthday!
I love subheadings. They add so much to an index, breaking down long strings of locators into smaller chunks, highlighting meaning distinctions, and gathering related entries into lists so readers only need to search in one place. As I discuss in my last reflection, subheadings can also reflect the story… Read More »When Subheadings Are Not So Useful
What does the process of indexing consist of? Is it primarily a process of extracting terms from the text? I’ve noticed, when talking to readers and editors, that this seems to be how many people conceptualize writing an index. It is less writing and more data mining. I want to… Read More »Indexing as Storytelling
Last month was very busy for me, culminating in the Indexing Society of Canada’s virtual conference, where I co-presented with Enid Zafran on the current state and future of embedded indexing. I may write more later about embedded indexing, but in the meantime, our findings reminded me of how segmented publishing… Read More »Finding Your Indexing Niche
It is not too often that I have the privilege of indexing an entire series. It is also not every index in which structure plays such a prominent role. I mean, structure—deciding which entries and arrays to create, where to place them within the index, and how they relate to… Read More »Indexing Yellowstone’s Wolves