A Million Grains of SandIndexing !e Shelte"ng Sky by Paul Bowles

The novelOriginally published in 1949

Underground success at the time, now a 20th century classic

An American couple wander the desert of Post-World War French West Africa

Incomprehensible alien culture

complex, interweaving plot

psychology, existentialism, nihilism, morals, ethics

Echoes the clash of cultures today

Indexing FictionRarely done commercially

Hazel Bell, Ambrose Ransley, Tom Murphy, O. Carm.

A.S. Byatt and Pynchon novels, Proust, The Scarlet Letter, The English Patient, 1984

Controversial

‘Taking apart the cathedral’

Enable the reader to cheat

Expensive

Readers don’t ask for them

Candy’s influence

Some fiction indexes are available on the Web

Lisa Mirabile, a 419 grad from 1997, inspired several!

Thomas Pynchon novels

Grendel, The Great Gatsby

Catcher in the Rye

The ProjectObjectives

For general readers

Depth suitable for academics to locate themes

Enable a richer reading experience

The plan

Read, re-read, re-read again

Make notes in the text

Design a database and enter the terms

‘You’re going to write in the book?

DetailsSelecting terms and subheading phrases

look to the text

look to the time period

Ordering the subheadings logically

alphabetically?

chronologically?

Drawing the line on detail

removing repetitive subheadings

combining like concepts

The RealityHow many variations on wind do you need?

How do you succinctly describe:

Existential angst?

Hallucinatory experiences?

Expressions of love?

Is that what Bowles meant?

Does anyone care about burnouses?

The Reality

Term consistency

Evocative phrases

Following the journey

Don’t give it away! Obfuscating plot points

Seems sort of arbitrary

TechnicalitiesThe database:

Technicalities

No way to format the export?!?

XHTML and Indexing standards

Evaluation4 users, varying familiarity with indexes

Limited capabilities because they were unfamiliar with the text

Read 4 passages

Find two terms that referred to the passage

Write up to three concepts they would assign

Positive results

Added back two terms removed

Added three new cross-references

And next...The Russians!

http://strikeseason.net/school/indexing/million-grains.html

index

introduction

paper and slide presentation download

Questions?