Sunday, August 4, 2013

Fun with Indexing - Le Donne

The best part about writing a new books is creating the indices. I just live for indexing.  Indexing rabbinic literature is thrilling and don't even get me started on alphabetizing!  For my latest project, I'm trying something new.  In addition to your standard indices, I've added an index under the heading "Artists, Poets, and Modern Media". Here are the artists, poets, and modern media subjects that I discuss in The Wife of Jesus:
al-Mulawwah, Qays ibn
al-Qayyim, Ibn
al-Sarraj,
The Big Lebowski
James Bond
Bored to Death
Brown, Dan
Buonarroti, Michelangelo
Calvin and Hobbes
Carter, Jimmy
Cox, Renée
The Da Vinci Code
Dafoe, Willem
The Dave Matthews Band
DeMille, Cecil B.
Derek and the Dominos
Donne, John
Eliot, George (Mary Anne Evans)
Eyck, Jan van
Frost, Robert
Ganjavi, Nizami
Giuliani, Rudolph
Goodstein, Laurie
Imus, Don
John, Elton
Kazantzakis, Nikos
The Last Temptation of Christ
Latimer, Hugh
Mad Men
Matsys, Quinten
News media
O’Reilly, Bill
Patterson, Veronica
Persian Love Poetry
Picasso, Pablo
Rijn, Rembrandt van
Sallman, Warner
Schrader, Paul
Scorsese, Martin
Thoreau, Henry David
Troubadours
Voragine, Jacobus de
Watterson, Bill
Weiner, Matthew
Xüan, Fu 
So what do you think? Is something like this more helpful than just adding these subjects/names into the general subjects index? Of course, the real reason I posted this is because I know that someone will catch an error or two that needs correcting. E.g. should it be "al-Qayyim, Ibn" or "Qayyim, Ibn al"?

On another note, when I first started taking classes in Bible, I would have never imagined that I would need to create a subject entry for "Breasts" in one of my books. Pages 15, 126, 149-151, 156, 160, 188-189, if you were wondering.

-anthony


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Anthony Le Donne (PhD) is the author of The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals.

                                          

4 comments:

  1. Not sure why Latimer is in there. Maybe he's working on a comeback album. Perhaps including a cover of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire".

    -anthony

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  2. yes - make the index comprehensive. It's a challenge - but it makes the book usable and reusable.

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  3. You're sort of the Bill Simmons of historical Jesus studies.

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  4. Fun with indexing. Really? Now, I know why I am a pastor. Though I have to admit, I'll take indexing over the wrath of a disgruntled parishioner.

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