This month I had the pleasure of reading The Secret Lives of Colour (2016) by Kassia St. Clair. It’s a fascinating read, and I learned so many interesting things about how human perception of colour both affects and is affected by culture, economics, and environment. It’s by no means exhaustive, but I appreciate that St. Clair chose to say as much in her introduction, focusing instead on highlighting whatever aspects of each colour she found most relevant or interesting. For some colours, it was the history of production, for others it was cultural connotations. But the reason I decided to pick up this book in the first place was the index.
St. Clair’s book demonstrates how subjective colours are to interpretation. It is highly impractical, not to mention likely impossible, to name every single shade of colour in existence. That doesn’t mean we don’t try – just looking at paint chips in a hardware store is proof enough. Perhaps her awareness of how ambiguous colour names are influenced her decision to have tiny coloured dots next to each colour name entry in her index. I found this to be a really interesting feature – the colours themselves are identifiable all on their own without a label, but it’s certainly more convenient for humans to use labels that are “close enough” rather than carry around colour swatches all the time (for an interesting take on what this might actually look like, check out Jasper Fforde’s novel Shades of Grey (2009)). St. Clair’s inclusion of colour samples in the index bring definition to otherwise potentially meaningless or confusing labels, which I believe makes it even more useful than if they had not been included.
Since perusing this index, I’ve been trying to think of other examples where visual representations of concepts would enhance the usability of an index. Mathematics certainly has its own language and symbol set, but often labels help more than hinder the layperson’s understanding of what concepts are included in a publication. A mathematical index would be best organized with the concept or function name first, followed by the relevant symbol. Abstract concepts, like love or happiness, are completely at the mercy of human language since nothing else exists to represent them except human experience.
What do you think? Have you seen any indexes that prioritize symbolic representations of concepts over language-specific labels? Are there any disciplines where you think symbolic representation in indexing would enhance usability? I’m really curious, so if anything comes to mind, I’d love to hear from you!
See also Indexing Services 