Joshua D. Jewkes and Dr. Gary R. Hooper, Comparative Literature

With the generosity on the part of the Office of Research and Creative Design and the grant offered me, I was able to produce a significant piece of scholarly work that will contribute significantly to a major academic field: a subject-word index for the academic journal, Scandinavian Studies. The actual work for the project was completed between January and August 1999. Through my experiences, I was able to broaden my knowledge of a field of study which I consider very interesting in addition to gaining valuable skills relating to editing, formatting, and indexing in journalism.

Scandinavian Studies is a rigorously refereed scholarly journal published quarterly by the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS), an association of scholars and others interested in the cultures of the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Founded in 1911, SASS has as its objectives:

1. The promotion of Scandinavian study and instruction;

2. The encouragement of original research in the fields of Scandinavian languages, literatures, history, culture, and society and the provision of a medium for the publication of the results of such research; and

3. The fostering of closer relations between persons interested in Scandinavian studies (1). In carrying out this project, I feel I have supported SASS in carrying out its objectives. Anyone interested in research relating to Scandinavian languages, literatures, history, society, and the cultures of the north may use this valuable tool as a resource.

The index stretches over a 35-year time period, from volume 37.1 (1965) until volume 71.3 (present). Since the journal is published quarterly, there are four issues each year, which equates to 139 issues covered by the index. Each issue contains an average of five or six articles submitted by well-known scholars across the world and approximately fifteen to twenty book reviews. The journal boasts about a twenty percent acceptance rate for submitted articles and caters to an audience of approximately six hundred individuals and two hundred libraries or institutions, one-fourth of which are located internationally. The index will be published in Scandinavian Studies Volume 71, issue 4 in winter of 1999. At a later point in the future, it will also be published at SASS’s home page http://humanities.byu.edu/SASSLINK/sasshome.htm on the World Wide Web. Thus the index will be distributed widely where it can be taken full advantage of.

My creation of the index proceeded in three phases: information gathering, compilation, and editing. The index itself is divided into six sections according to the category of information it presents: 1. Article author; 2. Book review author; 3. Book author; 4. Article title; 5. Book title; and most importantly, 6. Subject keywords. Each entry is followed by the corresponding volume, issue, starting page number, and ending page number where that item can be found. The following is a selection of the actual keyword section of the index:

Keywords
Niprstigningarsaga 41.2: 150–9; 47.3: 328–38
Niels Lyhne 38.2: 124–30
Njáls saga 42.2: 157–89; 44.2: 186–209; 45.1: 54–8; 46.2: 120–33; 54.4: 316–44; 56.3: 203–12
Nordic languages 46.2: 89–101
Nordiske Folkereisning 49.4: 387–411
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 50.2: 150–76
North American-Icelandic 39.2: 115–46
Northumbria 59.3: 308–24; 59.3: 325–37
Norway, history, seventeenth century 60.3: 347–70
Norway, history, nineteenth century 38.1: 13–9; 38.2: 102–23; 40.3: 233–47; 42.1: 14–30; 47.3: 364–82;
48.3: 316–8; 52.3: 245–63; 54.2: 137–47

The first phase of information gathering required me to go through the various issues and summarize each published article in several relevant subject words. Each article averaged about six keywords but some had as many as nine. These words would be used to construct the subject-word index. In doing so, I needed to put myself in the mind of a future researcher or scholar who might search the index for a specific topic of interest. Only those subjects that were useful, specific, and logical from an academic perspective were used.

When my information was gathered, I began to compile the index on a database. At first I worked from Borland’s Visual Dbase program. Later when circumstances necessitated, I transferred the information to Corel’s Paradox program from which I worked until the project’s completion. Paradox provided tables where I organized information into 24 fields. Each field contained information about the various index categories and the remaining fields were for repetitive information like second and third authors of articles or books. Thus, not only did I enter the subject words I had previously gathered, I also entered information for all the other sections, i.e. article titles, book titles, article authors, book review authors, etc. As you can imagine, this amounted to a huge number of entries scattered through well over 36,000 cells.

When finally all the needed information was compiled into the database, I began the final phase of editing and making all aspects of the index uniform. This required a great deal of massaging of the various entries. First I exported the Paradox tables and created a specific merge data file which I opened in Corel’s Word Perfect. When I was able to read the information, I made an extensive inspection of the keywords. I needed to make the various subjects “harmonize” with one another and to tie up any lose ends. This was especially necessary since the index would be distributed to a wide range of scholars who might be particular about the way in which their fields of academia were categorized. Final formatting and editing procedures included replacing international characters in the text that did not show up in the Paradox tables, correcting spelling, spacing, capitalization, and italicizing (because the Corel tables would not allow italics).

After months of efforts, the final product was an impressive organization of 35 years’ worth of scholarly material which will hopefully serve the academic community for years to come.