Hanno Biber: The Art of Lists. Imagining Digital Catalogues, Indexes, Registers, Tables, and so on ...
Catalogues, indexes, registers, tables and other forms of lists are textual formats of information representation of considerable and ever increasing importance in the context of current developments of digital knowledge systems in general and in relation to issues of visual linguistics in particular. The threefold question of the generation, the transformation and the representation processes of complex word lists and lexical indexes in digital text environments will be addressed in this paper thereby focusing on lexicographic research and on related issues of visualization in corpus linguistics. The digital generation of word lists, indexes, registers, tables and the like determines the visualization options. The digital transformation processes of lexical text analysis, corpus query results, information retrieval and other analytical procedures define the imaginative and descriptive potential of lists and similar entities and their representations in various formats. Digital representation systems of lexical data offer complex systematic linguistic information having specific graphic and typographic properties as well as image components that can be utilized in many ways and should be analyzed systematically. In the proposed paper also specific issues of the visualization of more or less complex lexical items will be discussed in detail. These objects of research will be investigated as digitally represented results of the analysis of language resources and text corpora. Various text types of lists will be studied. In one part of the presentation the essential properties and possible configurations of corpus generated catalogues of texts and excerpts from texts will be presented from the perspective of corpus linguistic research. In a second part, word form indexes and their varieties will be shown with a special emphasis on the needs of digital lexicography based upon corpus linguistics. In a third part, registers of names and named entities will be treated as a special case of knowledge representation and of text information systems in the context of visual linguistics. And, to give another example of the research questions in focus, tables of contents will be regarded as powerful accessing mechanisms for texts in the light of recent progress made in developing visualization strategies and visualization techniques. The new digital potential of creating and generating complex structures of information by transforming and representing the data derived from linguistic information systems needs consideration, further studies and research. Catalogues, indexes, registers, tables and other forms of lists and their digital presentation modes and visualization methods will be carefully studied for digital environments as well as in examples of digitally created print publications.