Where:
Online event
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
History
Event website:
https://www.americanancestors.org/events/dennis-duncan-index-history
Presented in partnership with the Boston Public Library and the State Library of Massachusetts
Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.
Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, lecturer Dennis Duncan offers a playful history of the humble index and tracks its outsized effect on our lives as readers, researchers, and cultural consumers. The book follows the index from German print shops to Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists’ living rooms to university laboratories, encountering along the way emperors, popes, philosophers, prime ministers, poets, librarians and, of course, indexers. Measuring the impact of this handy tool on our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart—and we have been for eight hundred years. Don’t miss his illustrated presentation and insight.
Saturday, Oct 12, 2024 8:00p
Secret Indoor Venue in Union Square, Somerville [exact location given to registered guests]
Tuesday, Oct 08, 2024 6:00p
Boston Area Spanish Exchange (BASE)