Can a good index be compiled by computer software, or is there an art to this overlooked endeavour?
It may be a sign of the joylessness of contemporary academia, or simply of inattentiveness to detail, but I have never paid much attention to the indexes in the scholarly books I have published. In fact, the only one that I think I ever checked properly was for an edited book where I had to index my own chapter myself. But then, the index is often a sore point in academic publishing. Many publishers require the author to pay for it themselves or to provide it themselves. As for my non-academic books, I don’t think I ever even asked the publishers to commission an index, save for an index of languages in my forthcoming one.
More fool me. Although I’ve used indexes to file content from books I’ve used in research, the index at the end of Dennis Duncan’s book shows they can be savoured as literary creations.