What is Index Integrity?
When I open a book on Haiti, I read the index first. I have been doing this for years. It is faster than reading the introduction and, in my experience, more honest. An index is not a neutral retrieval tool. It is a curatorial argument about what counts. Every entry is a claim that this concept matters; every absence is a claim that it does not. Index Integrity is my reading of how an author's index reflects whose lives, voices, and experiences they treated as worth indexing.
I want to be honest with you about what this is. It is a reading, not a measurement. The score is my interpretation, anchored in a public rubric so that you can argue with me. I want to make my intuitions explicit, not replace them with numbers that pretend to be objective.
The four axes
Inclusion
Whose names made it into the index. I look at the ratio of named individuals to anonymous masses. When I pick up a book on the Haitian Revolution and the index has two hundred personal names of which one hundred and eighty are French officers and twenty are Haitian leaders, the author has told me what kind of history they wrote, whether they meant to or not. I ask: are Haitian actors, women, and ordinary people named with the same granularity given to European officials?
Granularity
Whether Haitian experience is treated as having interior structure. I compare what I find. An index that says "slavery, see also plantations" tells me one thing. An index that says "slavery: African origins; coffles; ship transport; legal codes; resistance; manumission; emancipation; afterlives" tells me something very different. The second author thinks slavery has interior life worth navigating. The first author treats it as a single block. I ask: do slavery, Vodou, race, labor, and resistance get sub-entries, or are they lumped?
Centering
Page-count balance. When I count locators and find that Napoleon gets forty-seven page references and Dessalines gets nine, I know who the book is really about. The author may have called it a history of Haiti, but the index tells me where their attention actually went. I ask: does the locator-count ratio favor Haitian actors or European ones at comparable levels of historical importance?
Silences
What is structurally absent. This is the hardest axis to score because it requires me to know what should be there. I have to bring an expectation to the book, formed by other reading, before I can name what is missing. No women in a book on the Revolution? No Vodou in a book on Haitian culture? No mention of the 1825 indemnity in a book covering the early republic? I ask: are there obvious omissions given the book's scope? On this axis, more dots means fewer silences. Every dot is good.
The rubric
I score each axis from 0 to 5 in half-point steps. The composite is the mean of the four sub-scores, rounded to the nearest 0.5. Here is how I calibrate:
| Score | What I'm seeing |
|---|---|
| 5 | Exemplary: Haitian actors named with sub-entries; major concepts have multi-level granularity; locator counts balanced or favor Haitian actors; no structural absences I can name. |
| 4 | Mostly fair: All major figures named, some sub-entries; most concepts have sub-entries with one or two thin; slight imbalance toward European actors; one notable absence. |
| 3 | Uneven: Major Haitian figures named without granularity; mixed depth of treatment; noticeable imbalance; a few absences expected given scope. |
| 2 | Thin: Surface inclusion only; most concepts treated as single blocks; heavy imbalance toward European actors; several silences. |
| 1 | Token mentions; all Haitian-experience concepts lumped; almost entirely centered on non-Haitian actors; glaring absences. |
| 0 | I read this and felt the book was a study in silencing. Haitian agency effectively erased from the index. |
Where this comes from
I did not invent this framework. I am drawing on four bodies of work that have shaped how I read:
- Postcolonial historiography, especially Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). Trouillot's four moments of silencing — sources, archives, narratives, retrospective significance — map directly onto the four axes I use here. An index, as I read it, is a compressed retrospective-significance map.
- Critical bibliography, especially Donald F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986). McKenzie argued that paratext — indexes, footnotes, marginalia, typography — is part of a book's meaning, not separate from it. He gave me permission to take the index seriously as an argument.
- Indexology, the academic study of indexes (see The Indexer, the quarterly journal of the American Society for Indexing, since 1958). The field has long held that indexing involves curatorial judgment, not mechanical extraction. The indexers know what I am claiming here. I am just applying it to books on Haiti.
- Bibliometrics and citation analysis, especially the techniques developed by Eugene Garfield (Science Citation Index, 1964) for treating reference structures as data. The quantitative side of my method borrows from there.
The philosophical anchor for me is Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology: the idea that what gets named and what gets unnamed in a text reveals the author's structural position. Bourdieu was reading academic indexes as cultural-capital maps before anyone else was. I find that move clarifying.
What I want you to keep in mind
Not every book has an index worth analyzing. Translated works often inherit the original's index unchanged. Memoirs may not have indexes at all. Pamphlets and journal articles certainly don't. When the rating does not apply, I skip it.
This is interpretation, not measurement. Another reader applying the same rubric to the same index could land on a different score. I think that is fine. The rubric makes our disagreement legible rather than hidden.
Index Integrity is not my verdict. A book can be a Must Read with mediocre Index Integrity. The two ratings answer different questions for me. The verdict asks whether you should read this. The rating asks what the author thought was worth indexing. Both are useful. Neither replaces the other.
This is a starting point, not a conclusion. The score tells you what kind of book you are holding. It does not tell you whether the prose is brilliant, whether the argument holds, or whether the author's reading of the sources is sound. Read the review for that.