One of the indexes is produced using contemporary artificial intelligence indexing software. Human vs computer – whose index is better?Īt the back of Dr Duncan's book on the topic, Index, A History Of The, he includes not one but two indexes, in order to make a point. Indexes enabled people "to put those morsels together in new combinations". storehouses of morsels of information," Dr Duncan says. "Books stop being this slow linear thing that monks can read with all the time in the world to. He describes indexes as a "new type of information delivery" that enabled people to be able to preach or lecture at short notice, and to use and research their books "in a more efficient way". "Suddenly, they need to use books – not just read books, but use books." People need to write sermons," Dr Duncan says. "So you have two types of speaking: you have the lecture and the sermon.
The other thing was the arrival of preaching or mendicant religious orders, and a new idea to have friars live among the people in big cities to preach and "stop the flock from going astray". "Not coincidentally, Paris and Oxford are the places where the universities have just arrived," Dr Duncan says. In the early 13th century, two things happened to create the perfect time for the invention of the index. "It's like a kind of parchment Google – he's read everything and he can tell you where anything is." Why the need for an index? of every instance that the Trinity is mentioned across all of his reading," Dr Duncan says. "So he ends up with what he calls a grand table. "He read the Bible, the Church Fathers, pagan philosophy, Aristotle, the latest translations of Arabic philosophers."Īnd in the course of his reading, every time a favourite topic came up – for example animals, the Creation, Trinity and about 400 other things – Grosseteste marked a little symbol in the book's margins.Īt the end, he would comb the margins and make notes of where each topic appeared, and include the entry in a general index. Grosseteste was "a total polymath and a wonderful man who read everything", Dr Duncan says. Polymath who 'read everything'Īt the same time, over in Oxford, a man called Robert Grosseteste had come up with a similar idea. The friars listed about 10,000 individual words and 129,000 locations. "Every single word in the Bible put in alphabetical order a little locator telling you where that word appears," Dr Duncan explains. Their creation was a word index, or a concordance, and it broke down the Bible into its constituent words – "sin", for example, or "fish" or "bread". In Paris, an abbot named Hugh of Saint-Cher instructed a group of friars at the Dominican Friary of Saint-Jacques, who were "essentially corralled" into working on his invention, Dr Duncan says.Īmazingly, their markings have survived and the friars' different handwriting can still be seen today on not just the first index, but the notes towards it. Simultaneously in Paris and Oxford two people, with two different motivations, were beavering away at an idea that would make their work much easier. It was about 800 years ago, in 1230, that the index was invented. We can thank some monks, an avid reader and the rise of two different kinds of speeches for its existence. "It is the index that underpins the search engine … we're constantly relying on indexes."
If you use Google, you're one of many in this "age of search" who have a "reliance on a certain type of index", he tells ABC RN's Late Night Live. The index, that thing tucked inconspicuously at the end of a book was – and still is – essential, says Dennis Duncan, a writer, translator and English lecturer at University College London. Eight centuries ago, the need for a way to collect and organise the contents of a book was so great that two people, in two different cities, came up with a solution – at the same time.
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