Teaching the Embedded Index: Tagging in MS Word

Part I. Two Kinds of Failure

Failure during the publication process

A story—in the summer of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was in the final stages of publication for my first book. The main body of the book had gone through copyediting, although there were still a few formatting issues that needed to be addressed. Because of some internal changes in the editorial leadership at my publisher and a leave by the regular formatter, there was no one immediately available to do this work. And I, eager to see the book move forward, volunteered to do it myself.

When done, I received approval to hand over the final file to the indexer, whom I was individually responsible for securing. I hired a reputable, experienced, traditional indexer who worked from a hardcopy of the final proofed text to produce the index terms and the page numbers. She printed the document that I sent and, in due course, sent me a detailed index. It was my responsibility to check the page references and make suggestions for additions or modifications. Almost immediately, however, I realized that none of the page numbers aligned with my copy of the text. After some investigation, what my indexer and I discovered was that the older version of MS Word that she used to open and then print the book that I sent her did not include the typeface that my publisher had chosen. The character spacing (or tracking), kerning (the spacing between letters), and the size of each letter for the given typeface was different. I was horrified to learn that every single page reference would need to be checked and corrected.

I suppose that if this had not been my first book, I may have anticipated this problem. And for a while, I lamented this needless waste of time and effort and tortured myself internally with thoughts of “if only.” If only the formatter at my publisher had been available to finalize the last few pages of the proof. I am guessing that he never would have made the mistake that I did, which was to hand off a Word document instead of a PDF to an indexer. If only my indexer, who had only ever worked in PDF before, had thought to ask for a PDF version instead of a Word version.1 If only my indexer’s MS Word had been more up to date, the software would never have made the conversion that it did. If only I had sent a PDF.

This self-pity, however, had to take second place to necessity. I had a book to finish. And, somewhat wizened by the experience, I decided that, not only was I going to correct the mistake of the shifted page numbers, I would also figure out how to address the problem in a way that protected against this kind of failure in the future. And because I was already working in MS Word, I decided that, for all its cumbrousness, the fact that I already had it on my computer and that I would have good cause to continue to use it in the future, made it worth trying.

It took two months, but I learned how to use MS Word’s indexing tool and I re-indexed my book, working from the headwords that my indexer provided me. In her wordlist of subject terms, I had an experienced guide. And yet, no one knew the book better than I did; so, as I worked my way through, I made many modifications and additions. In the process, I realized how much I could influence a reader’s ability to understand the text by my articulation of its structure in the index and how the index was much more than a simple access point. It taught me in its construction, and it would teach each reader of my book who benefited from its authorial structure. The index’s hierarchy of terms and network of references and cross-references became part of my authorial product.

Failure in the classroom

With the first flush of discovery, I did what I imagine many teacher-scholars do. I decided, in the Spring of 2021, to teach my students how to make an index. About once a year, I teach an Introduction to Digital Humanities course that is a requirement for our English students as well as DH Minors (see Smith and Hogan 2022). I was under the impression that a single afternoon would be enough to give students an adequate understanding of the power of this indexing tool. I thought that I was teaching a technical skill alone. And given the few steps involved, I assumed that this would be a relatively quick “trick” that they could pick up now and use someday when writing their own theses.

What I did not realize, however, is that students are as different from me as I was from my traditional indexer. They were not just digital writers, as I was. They were also digital readers. Virtually all their scholarly reading had been digital. In order to access a point in a text in a non-linear fashion, that is, not just reading it beginning to end, they used ctrl+F searches, not indexes. And when presented with a physical book with an index, they often ignored it altogether. As one of my recent students put it, “I’ll be honest, the index was always the part of the book I never really paid much attention to.”2 A few students were so unfamiliar with the apparatus that they had to be told that one finds an index in the back of a book, rather than the front.

What I also failed to appreciate is that, while I had never been self-consciously trained to index, I had formative ancillary experiences that were closely related. I was not the novice that I thought I was. As a graduate student, I worked as a research assistant on the digitization project of the 1582 Corpus Juris Canonici, the “Body of Canon Law.” I was part of a team that transcribed and added locators (book, title, and chapter numbers) to the Liber Extra: the Materiae Singulares (an index to the Ordinary Gloss) and the Margarita Decretalium (an index to the decretals of the Liber Extra). And, as a medievalist, I worked in lexicography when creating word lists of first attestations for Reginald Pecock.

I should not have been surprised that, in my first year of teaching indexing, many of the student-produced indexes were functionally useless or nonsensical. And so, I knew that, if I wanted to continue to teach the technical skill, I would also need to flesh out its theoretical purpose. This article is the articulation of that theoretical purpose. While it began with two sorts of failures, it is ultimately oriented towards the modest successes that followed when I taught indexing again in Spring 2022, as well as the hope and improvements that I plan to implement in future years. I begin with an argument for why this lesson matters in today’s curriculum by situating indexing within larger conversations in the digital humanities that are concerned with the influence of infrastructure, the value of different forms of labor, and the scale at which such work is most effectively pursued within the curriculum. I finish with a basic how-to-teach embedded indexing with both conceptual and practical steps that would make it possible to teach these skills to students or, for that matter, to most humanities scholars who may want to index their own work.

Part II. Indexing as Digital Critical Composition

My reading and study on digital humanities and digital pedagogy eventually led me to identify three arguments that now undergird my argument concerning the value of teaching indexing to students:

• Infrastructure - Students must, from the earliest stages of writing, develop skills in the recognition and understanding of digital infrastructure. As the gateway to such knowledge, digital infrastructure limits and shapes knowledge. (This is true even when the digital infrastructure is used to produce a product that is later consumed in analogue form, as is true of a book index.)
• Labor - Historically, the work of such classification has been carried out by invisible labor and, when considered at all, is assumed to be a neutral addendum to the main text. But such labor is not neutral for the above reasons, and non-neutral frameworks of knowledge ought not to be invisible or overlooked because, in addition to the moral obligation to credit such labor, blindness to it results in failure to understand the relevant subjects of study.
• Scale - Therefore, in methods courses that focus on composition or research, i.e. the cultivation of scholarly skills in which the objective is the discovery of truth, knowledge of the design of the digital infrastructures at play (including indexes) is fundamental to information literacy. And indexing, as a critical component of this infrastructure, should be taught to those in such composition or research courses.

Critical infrastructure

The first argument is predicated on the main thesis of the emerging field of (Digital) Critical Infrastructure Studies, which, according to its primary founder, Alan Liu, is a necessary complement to Cultural Studies because “in late modernity when the bulk of life and work occurs in organizational institutions of one kind or another, the experience of infrastructure at institutional scales … is operationally the experience of “culture” (Liu 2016).  By such logic, all those who seek proficiency in the area of humanistic study would benefit from intentional study of infrastructure. And the best way to understand that infrastructure is to use those tools to learn how they potentially “[alter] primary sources in an unexpected and tendentious [way]” (Tenen 2016). Indexing is textual infrastructure. Students who learn to index will understand how their digital tools may alter their primary sources on which so much interpretive weight depends. Indeed, this discernment is only becoming more important given the growing accessibility of AI and other text-mining tools, which often have a flattened conception of language that may lead to false or misleading conclusions (Binder 2016).

Visible and invisible labor

The second argument about labor is one that has been addressed before. Melissa Terras has highlighted the critical role of women in the creation of the first DH project by Father Robert Busa in 1949 (Terras 2016), and more recently, Christina Boyles has discussed the ways in which intersectionality is implicated in digital infrastructure (Boyles 2021). To that discussion, I would like to add that the invisible labor of the “punch card operative” has also been present in certain editorial fields as well. Indexers are rarely, if ever, credited for their work and yet it is critical work in the scholarly arena. Indexes are a defining element of a scholarly book, and oftentimes serve as the gateway to scholarly reading.

This uncredited and therefore invisible classification work is closely connected to whether participants see that labor as a skill at all, i.e. teachable. Indexing, however, falls into a category of activities that is either deemed such a low-level intellectual activity that one can partake without a need for specialized training, or it is one that is an innate talent rather than a cultivated skill.

Ironically, the leading textbook on indexing, Indexing Books by Nancy C. Mulvany argues that indexing cannot be taught:

Book indexing is something you will either enjoy or detest; there is little middle ground. You will have a knack for it or you won’t. I do not believe that indexing can be taught. (2005)

This attitude is not unlike the one which prevailed for many years in manuscript studies where it was believed that the paleographical skills of dating and localization could not be taught .3 There is, of course, a grain of truth in Mulvany’s characterization; people do tend to have strong emotional reactions to indexing. However, while some people may have a knack for conceptual mapping, the intellectual activity of giving a substantive name to a portion of textual accidence is one that can be practiced and improved. Mulvany claims that we cannot teach people “to analyze a text objectively and accurately,” and yet, this is the expertise of teachers of English; we call it literary analysis and interpretation.

Small scale DH experiences

If indexing is then a form of expertise that can be taught and that doing so is a movement towards recognition of valuable but heretofore invisible labor, then students must have such opportunities to learn these skills in class. They need guided, graded, small-scale opportunities.

The benefits are manifold. Those who have had the experience of creating their own indexes will be more likely to utilize the indexes in the academic volumes that they encounter in other situations. This will help them conduct their own research. Like training exercises, moreover, the work of creating an index also has the benefit of cultivating several scholarly virtues, including comprehensiveness, consistency, and systematic analysis. That is, indexing helps to foster discipline and rigor in humanistic research which deals with qualitative evidence. Student-indexers will also invariably develop judgment about what ideas to prioritize, how to organize and hierarchize those ideas, and how to conceptualize their work beyond its chronological presentation, the ordo narrationis of a text (Parkes 1995, 25).

Within the curriculum

Where in the humanities curriculum such a class should be taught will vary by institution. As Ryan Cordell (2016) has pointed out, digital humanities skills, knowledge, and theory are best delivered within a scaffolded curriculum and “locally” situated such that it fits “in specific curricula and with specific institutional partners.”

At Pepperdine University, where I developed this lesson plan, this means that the indexing lesson fits most naturally in an Introduction to Digital Humanities course, which is simultaneously a requirement for the English major and for the Digital Humanities minor. For English majors, the class, Introduction to DH, is also in a de facto three-course sequence that also includes ENG 101, English Composition, and ENG 201, English Studies. In ENG 101, “the emphasis is on reading and writing critically and developing an effective writing process, including strategies for generating and researching ideas, drafting, revision, and editing” (Seaver 2024, 259). ENG 201, English Studies, is “an introduction to textual, rhetorical and literary analysis and methods of scholarship in English studies” (Seaver 2024, 259). And ENG 205, Introduction to DH, is “an introduction to software assisted textual analysis as well as textual criticism”(Seaver 2024, 259) For Digital Humanities Minors, this class is paired with one of two possible introductory Computer Science classes, COSC 101, Programming Principles I with Python or COSC 105, Programming Principles I with R. In both classes, students learn “programing constructs: sequential, conditional, iterative, nested conditional, nested iterative,” “run time analysis,” “functions: parameter passing mechanisms, function libraries,” as well as data structures such as “one- and two-dimensional lists, tuples, ranges, dictionaries, sets,” and “vectors, matrices, lists, data frames.”. Generally, DH minors take ENG 205 before COSC 101 or 105 (Seaver 2024, 357).

For English students, the indexing lesson is, therefore, best understood as part of a larger series of subjects focused on their development in methods of writing, reading, and research that move from composition studies through literary and rhetorical studies and finally to textual studies with a class that privileges the archival primary source. The Digital Humanities sequence is similar to that in English—DH students will have also taken ENG 101 as part of their core requirements regardless of their major—but its culmination in a COSC class means that the final emphasis will be on coding universals rather than primary source particulars. In both cases, indexing fits within a series of classes that are about writing, genre, and language.

Within the class

The second time I taught indexing, I improved the “localization” of the lesson. Instead of treating the subject as a standalone lesson, I nestled it between an introduction to MS Word Styles. This emphasized hierarchy and coding in TEI-XML, which required understanding of both hierarchy and the nature of tagging. Learning how to tag a text for an index in MS word is a good preliminary step to other kinds of coding, thereby easing the psychological barriers to the following lesson. This placement was especially helpful since many students of English are afraid of technology. They are, however, more likely to try something new if the novel element involves a new feature within a program that they already use regularly. And while many students are accustomed to tagging a photo or a post in social media, few students, especially in English, are comfortable with the idea of coding as such.

Part III. Embedded Indexing Step-by-Step Lesson Plan

Step 1a. Introduce the analogue index (in class practicum)

Introduce indexes by having students examine physical books first, where they can, at a glance, see its constituent parts (table of contents, chapters, bibliography, index, etc.). Fetch a stack of scholarly monographs or edited collections (or have the students do it).4 In a guided discussion, pose these questions:

• What are the main components of a scholarly book?
• Where do you find an index?
• What is the purpose of an index?
• How is it similar to or different from an electronic search engine?
• How is an index organized? i.e. 1) alphabetically, 2) by main headings, 3) sub-headings, and 4) cross-references.

Subheadings and cross-references need special attention. Explain the difference between a cross reference that says “see” and one that says “see also.” The first, “see,” is used for a synonymous term in which all references have been conflated into a single list and the second, “see also,” is for a related term or concept that offers new information. For example, both DC and Washington DC may be listed in an index; however, “Washington, DC” is the normative instance of the city and would, therefore, be the main entry. “DC” could theoretically appear in the index as, “DC, See Washington, DC”. A reference to “Watergate” might say, “See also, Nixon, Richard” to direct the reader’s attention to related information.

Step 1b. Identify index terms

Combining and naming index terms

Hand out a hardcopy document that also has a machine-readable analogue and which will also serve as the basis for Step 2.5 It is best if the document has intrinsic interest for and is comprehensible to the student. The entire class should index the same text; this commonality allows students to make comparisons and for you to provide better guidance and later, accountability.

Introduce the theory of indexing. Fundamentally, naming an index term is an act of transfiguration, the changing of its outward incidental appearance into an idealized form. The transfiguration takes a temporal instance of a thing and changes it into its timeless Platonic ideal.

For example, if we were to look at a text about President Reagan, references might appear in a half dozen ways: Ronald Reagan, President Reagan, Reagan, the 40^th president, the President, the former president, Dutch, the Gipper, etc. In an index, however, convention dictates that all appearances merge into a single reference: Reagan, Ronald (President). Indexers even identify instances of a concept that do not have a direct textual representation, i.e. coded references to people, places, things, and ideas.

It is not simply a transference from the main body of the text to an aggregated list at the back of the book, as in a concordance in which words are represented in the same way in the index list as they are in the body of the text. In fact, the assumption is that there will be a shift between the accidental manifestation and the substantive presentation. In this, I am applying the same methods and terminology that textual critics have applied to the creation of critical editions,6 which has a well-articulated theoretical framework that usefully augments current scholarship on indexing’s history (Duncan 2022; Duncan and Smyth 2023) and conventions (Knight 1979; Mulvany 2005). Though this activity sounds complicated, it is analogous to the work performed by students of literature in which quotations from a text, instances of the real, are abstracted into themes.

Introduce normative naming. The goal of the indexer is to identify the various manifestations of a single subject, choose a single term which can then serve as a stand-in for every manifestation, and provide locational data so that a reader can jump to each section of the text that addresses that subject. Note that this normative term may not exist anywhere in the text.

Show the students examples:

Then, ask them to read and highlight terms from the document that they think will serve as good subjects to index. Have students identify concrete nouns (persons, places, things), and abstract nouns that are events. (Indexing other kinds of abstract nouns is much more difficult and should be reserved for another lesson or class.)

When they are done, write as many of these terms on the board, or on a projected document, as you can and discuss the normative entries.

Alphabetizing

This is also a good opportunity to review the rules of alphabetizing. Although the software will alphabetize the entries automatically, student-indexers must be aware of the eventual output of the index, and how students’ name index tags will, of course, influence their output. Students, who have never been responsible for alphabetizing before, are especially prone to list names first then last (Jennifer Smith) rather than last then first (Smith, Jennifer), as is conventional. They are also likely to include rather than exclude or shift articles (the Constitution vs. Constitution, the). Since most indexes require letter by letter alphabetization, this is the style that makes the most sense to teach.

For homework, ask the students to finish highlighting the terms or concepts on their printed documents and marking up the margins with the normative entries that they will then learn to enter into the software in the next class. They should also regularly consult the Chicago Manual of Style, MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, or style guide of your choice for questions about how to handle naming their entries.

Before the next class, ensure that MS Word is either downloaded on each student’s personal computer or in the computer lab, if available. Many universities provide access to Office 365 at no cost to students.

Step 2. Guided indexing with MS Word (in class practicum)

When you meet as a class next, you will need the ability to project your screen, screenshare the screens of your students, even if they are in the room, and ensure students have access to computers with MS Word and their hand-marked documents. Zoom or Google Meet can be used for these purposes.

I should note that, in addition to these basic written instructions about how to create an index in MS Word, there are many excellent online tutorials, some of which are quite detailed. Indexers are helpful people! If your school has a subscription to LinkedIn Learning, one of the lessons in the MS Office Certification Course provides lessons in Indexing as well as very helpful practice files. The University of Cambridge Press also provides a helpful YouTube video, Indexing in Microsoft Word, and a set of written guidelines for its authors.

1: Show an example of a page of a document both with and without the paragraph mark ¶ showing.7

2: Highlight and tag a term in the text using the MS Word assisted interface by clicking on the Mark Entry button in the References toolbar.

3: The following toolbox will appear. Modify the term if necessary.

Keep in mind that, in order for an index to render properly at the end of a document by combining each entry of a tag into a single headword with associated page numbers, each instance of the tag must be exactly the same. This means letter for letter identity and space for space identity. Capitalization and manually applied character formatting must be the same.

4: Once you are comfortable creating main entries, practice creating a subentry using the MS Word facilitated dialogue box. The process is the same, but now, you must consider both fields—the main entry and its subsidiary term.

Tip! Addressing multi-page index locations. For a beginning indexer, it may be best to skip multi-page index references. However, if this is an aspect that you would like to cover, there are two different ways that you can achieve the same outcome.

1. Typically, the way that MS Word accommodates this challenge is by first creating a bookmark and then tagging the entire bookmark. The advantage of tagging your text in this way is that the page locators will automatically produce the appropriate page span for the citation; however, creating a multi-page bookmark is quite cumbersome. First, you create a bookmark, essentially a highlighted portion of the text in question, which you then must give a unique name. Second, you tag that bookmark. Creating a multipage bookmark, however, can be very ungainly and keeping track of your naming convention for each multi-page bookmark adds another layer of complexity.
2. There is, however, a workaround that is practical in most instances. Since the index that is rendered in MS Word is itself editable, I recommend a combination of manual and automatic practices to achieve the desired outcome. Once you are done with your entire index and are sure that you will no longer make any changes to the number of citations or the headwords, read through your index identifying instances where multiple pages come in succession. Review those relevant pages and citations and then decide whether you want to combine those entries into a single page locator or leave them as separate page locators. Simply type over the existing page numbers with your preferred conflation. I suggest keeping a copy of the index in this form in a separate word document so that if you do end up altering your index again and need to re-render it, thereby altering the page references, you can quickly copy transfer the merged citations into the updated version.

5: Add an index tag by manually typing out the elements of the tag.

Since tags are nothing more than a series of symbols and letters, you can skip the dialogue box by copying and pasting and modifying tags that already exist in your document. An index tag in MS word reads curly bracket, space, capital X, Capital E, space, double quotation mark, term, double quotation mark, curly bracket: { XE “tag” }.

Additional sub-entries: if you intend to have an index with more than two levels, this can only be achieved through this manual process since the MS Word dialog box does not have more than two levels built in. You can create an infinite number of sub-entries by adding a colon between terms, for example: { XE “index:embedded:tag” }.

Tip! In order to avoid introducing formatting variations in the tags, which prevent proper merger, copy and paste common tags rather than creating new tags each time.

6: Create a “See” cross-reference.

Cross-references only need to be marked once in a text. Repeatedly marking a cross-reference will only result in duplicate entries in the rendered index. It does not matter where you place this cross-reference, but in general, I suggest that you associate the cross-reference with the first instance of the synonymous term. In this way, you will always know where you put it.

7: Create a “See also” cross-reference.

As with the “See” cross-reference, a “See also” cross-reference only needs to be marked one time.

8: Before rendering the final index, hide the mark-up by clicking on the paragraph tab. (See step 1 above.)

If you fail to do this, the page numbers will be incorrect since the addition of the visible tags makes your document significantly longer than it would be without them.

9: Render your index at the end of the document.

Navigate to the end of the document, and “Insert Index” from the References toolbar.

10: Choose the style of Index you would like to have.

Your final index should look something like Figure 10.

Tip! For long projects, render your index repeatedly so that you can catch mistakes early in the process. Doing so will also allow you to identify terms or concepts that should be cross-referenced or renamed.

Step 3. Independent indexing (take-home assignment)

At home, students should complete the indexing of the assigned text and, at a minimum, include at least one of each of the types of index terms listed above. In addition to a version of the directions, include a list of minimum requirements:

Simple directions

For homework, please index XXX text.

• Briefly describe the rhetorical context of your index (its audience and purpose)
• Index all terms, esp. nouns, using the categories of people, places, things, and events as your guide, etc.
  • ex. Lincoln, Abraham, 25, 44, 67
  • If you’ve created the tag consistently, the same tag should combine naturally into a single entry in the rendered Index.
  • Please tag so that the alphabetical listing at the end is consistent with the Chicago Manual of Style 16.9 Main headings for index entries, being sure to ignore “a/an” and “the” at the start of an index term and alphabetizing names by last name first.
• Include at least two instances of a sub-heading in the index
  • ex. US Presidents
    • Lincoln, Abraham, 25, 44, 67
    • Trump, Donald, 88, 145, 200
• Include at least two types of each kind of cross-reference,
  • ex. 45th President, See Trump, Donald
  • ex. See also, January 6 Insurrection
• Render the Index at the end of the entire textbook
• Proofread your Index

Please submit your assignment as a Word Document.

Step 4. Comparing the indexes (in-class review)

If you have time, and especially because it is likely the students’ first time indexing, it is valuable to have an in-class day where students compare their indexes before being formally graded. The Chicago Manual of Style has a very helpful Index-editing checklist (16.133) that can be used as a guide. What will be apparent is that every index will vary depending on the indexer’s level of comprehensiveness. Students will benefit from index “norming,” the process whereby they compare their own terms and level of detail and focus with those of their peers.

First, begin by examining two or three students’ indexes. Project the indexes on the screen one at a time. Students will feel incentivized to have their work chosen as an example if it means that mistakes in the technical execution are remedied in class.

Second, turn to index-making as art. Ideally, you should project two indexes on the screen and ask students why the differences exist. Are they substantive differences? What does one indexer implicitly value over the other? Which index seems most helpful or usable? Why?

Step 5. Assessing the indexes

First, make sure that students turn in their assignments as a Word Document. Sometimes, out of habit, students may turn in assignments as PDFs. In order to view the tags in the assignment, it is important to have access to the marked-up text. That is, students should turn in not just the index but the entire tagged text.

Second, assess whether the student has mastered the relevant skills and conventions (combination, sub-entries, alphabetizing, etc.). If a student makes a mistake once, they typically make the mistake repeatedly, so it is better to do a skills assessment rather than count the number of mistakes. An ambitious indexer who is mistaken in one area may create dozens of tags that are incorrect but is only mistaken about one basic element. That misunderstanding should be treated as one mistake, not two dozen.

Third, evaluate the quality of the index as a [para]text. Be prepared to evaluate the index on the basis of its content quality, not just on its mechanical execution. Evaluate the index’s ability to meet its basic rhetorical situation based on whatever hypothetical the student has chosen: purpose, audience, personal motivation (author), and context. Critically, a student’s comprehension of the text will be reflected in their ability to hierarchize subjects and cross-list when necessary.

As part of this evaluation of the quality of the index, you may also consider the indexer’s philosophy of indexing as indicated by their articulation of their rhetorical situation. Does the indexer favor neutrality and objectivity (the traditional model) or does the indexer have social justice aims? If the latter, consider how the index treats people and contentious subjects by checking for reasonable consistency, bias, and inclusive language. Indexes generally privilege convention and neutral naming protocols; however, some conventions may no longer be acceptable to all parties described.8 It may be appropriate, for example, to modernize terminology even when indexing an historical work. When evaluating privilege, check to see which individuals are categorized with their titles as well as their names. Do figures of equal importance have cross-references in instances where they may be known by more than one name? How are contentious places categorized (e.g. if listing countries, how would one categorize Palestine, the Punjab, Taiwan, Tibet, etc.)? How are contentious events categorized (as protests vs. riots, etc.)? Is it possible to cross-list in such a way that the index is easily used as well as appealing to its audience?

Finally, a more comprehensive list of criteria for what makes an excellent index can be found in the award criteria for the (now retired) American Society for Indexing Annual Award (American Society for Indexing 2021). This longer set of criteria can be used as a baseline for a rubric approach to grading.

Part IV. Conclusion

Earlier, I mentioned that upon teaching indexing the second time, I experienced modest improvements in the students’ work. This appeared both in the number and scale of revisions required for the indexing assignment as well as in the students’ final exams. For the final, I asked students to read and respond to C. M. Sperberg-McQueen’s chapter, “Classification and its Structures” in a timed environment. They had not seen the chapter before. They were tasked with identifying the chapter’s thesis (problem statement, claim, and significance) and connecting its ideas to the content of the class. Several of the students chose to write about the experience of indexing in MS Word. In one student’s words:

Through that assignment, I learned that humans naturally classify objects differently and it is important to recognize the ambiguity of these classifications. Like Sperberg-McQueen stated, classification schemes are infinite and can never truly be exhaustive. As I was working on my MS Word Assignment, I encountered instances where objects could be classified in different ways, and I had to decide on how to classify them. This understanding is significant because it demonstrates the need for constant discussion and reexamination regarding classification. By understanding that classification is not something that is definite, it allows for a broader understanding of the digital humanities.9

I was struck by the fact that all the students who chose to write about the MS Word Indexing Assignment in response to Sperberg-McQueen’s chapter expressed similar points about the dynamic, contingent nature of classification. Their recognition of the challenges of such classification, along with the value of carefully designed and crafted classification schemes, encourages me of the worthwhile nature of the assignment. All students in the Humanities, but especially those in English and Digital Humanities, whose daily work is concerned with the effective use of language, stand to make meaningful contributions to these digital forms of classification composition.