Summary of Dennis Duncan's Index, A History of the

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The story of Henry Rhodes Hamilton, a man who may have been one of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, is told through an alphabetical index. The reader must piece together a narrative using only keywords, brief subheadings, and the sense of chronology provided by the page numbers.
#2 The index is a strange, miraculous thing. It is something we take for granted, but something that appeared out of nowhere 2,000 years ago and is used every day. It is a system of ordering works of art by the artists’ surnames.
#3 The alphabetical exhibition is not hard to understand. It is a great leveller, and nothing is implied by its ordering. But what about the viewer. What about us as potential visitors to the show.
#4 The first English dictionary, published in 1604, was written by Robert Cawdrey. It was considered the first example of alphabetical order in English. While we may not appreciate an alphabetical art show, we will happily use alphabetical order in other contexts.

Sujets

• Général

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 22 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669357865
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Dennis Duncan's Index, a History of the
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The story of Henry Rhodes Hamilton, a man who may have been one of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, is told through an alphabetical index. The reader must piece together a narrative using only keywords, brief subheadings, and the sense of chronology provided by the page numbers.

#2

The index is a strange, miraculous thing. It is something we take for granted, but something that appeared out of nowhere 2,000 years ago and is used every day. It is a system of ordering works of art by the artists’ surnames.

#3

The alphabetical exhibition is not hard to understand. It is a great leveller, and nothing is implied by its ordering. But what about the viewer. What about us as potential visitors to the show.

#4

The first English dictionary, published in 1604, was written by Robert Cawdrey. It was considered the first example of alphabetical order in English. While we may not appreciate an alphabetical art show, we will happily use alphabetical order in other contexts.

#5

Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall is a book intended to provide the definitions of loan words, words that are used in English but that are borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or French. It is for readers who have not had the benefit of having been schooled in these languages.

#6

The ordering of the letters in the alphabet was around for a long time before it was pressed into administrative service. Clay tablets discovered in northern Syria show that the order of the letters in the alphabet used in the city of Ugarit was established by the middle of the second millennium BCE.

#7

The first five letters of the Hebrew alphabet are displayed on a limestone stairway at Lachish in central Israel. The alphabetical order is being used as a poetical scaffolding to determine the first letter of each verse in the Book of Lamentations.

#8

The Library of Alexandria was the largest library in the ancient world, and it was here that the greatest scholars of the age lived, studied, and taught. It was dedicated to the muses, and its centerpiece was the largest collection of scrolls in the world.

#9

The Pínakes was a catalogue of all the works housed in the great library. It was organized by genre, and alphabetically by name. It also provided biographical data and bibliographical data.

#10

The Greeks had a method of identifying individual scrolls that was similar to a dust jacket. It was known as a sittybos, or more commonly sillybos. When Cicero, the great Roman statesman and orator, decided to tidy up his personal library, one of the jobs that needed doing was the fixing of these labels to each roll.

#11

The use of alphabetical order represents a huge intellectual leap: the rejection of the intrinsic characteristics of the materials being organized in favor of something off-the-peg, something arbitrary.

#12

The use of alphabetical order in the Greek world spread beyond the scholarly sphere and into civic administration, cultic practices, market trading, and tax collecting. However, in the Roman world, alphabetical order was not seen as essential.

#13

The first appearance of alphabetical order in Latin comes in a bawdy comedy written around the beginning of the second century BC. It concerns an old man, Demaenetus, and his attempts to cheat his wife out of enough money to buy the freedom of a certain prostitute so that she can marry his son.

#14

The first book index was created in the mid-sixteenth century. It was called An Orthographie, and it contained the due order and reason how to write or paint the image of man's voice, which was similar to the life of nature.

#15

Hart wanted to write the way people speak, and to show this, he included an analysis of spoken English in his book.