Emergency Index – An Annual Document of Performance Practice Vol. 7
Marita Bullmann performance is featured in the annual publication of Emergency Index Vol. 7. This book is documenting 260 works from 51 countries made in 2017, described by their creators, and indexed by name, place, and common terms.
“ONE OF THE MORE TIME CONSUMING STEPS in editing emergency INDEX is compiling the index of terms, that funny list at the back of the book that catalogs words, concepts, historical and conceptual references from hundreds of pages of text; terms are extracted and lined up neatly, each with their modest tail of page numbers extending outwards. In our case, it isn’t indexing software doing the extracting, but a human reader, scanner, disambiguator, gleaner, CTRL-F-presser, copy-and-paster who selects words that the author might have thought to be key to their project, or that some future reader might search for. Indexing software cannot accomplish this, and, perhaps, even a human indexer is far from perfect.
If you index a monograph, or a single-author book, chances are that the author uses terms in particular ways, within a specific context that makes each appearance of the term a point connecting to a larger argument. In our case, for an annual book that documents more than 300 performance events, an index of terms is not what it appears to be…”
Yelena Gluzman, Co-Editor