ISC Member Gillian Watts was interviewed on the Instagram Digital Soapbox at the Word on the Street (Toronto) virtual event in September.
Indexing Society of Canada
ISC/SCI member wins the Purple Pen award
The Institute of Certified Indexers has announced that Jess Klaassen-Wright has won the 2020 Purple Pen Competition. Jess’s index appears in the book Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions by Oludamini Ogunnaike (to be published in October 2020 by Pennsylvania State University Press).
Jess created an index for this 450-page book which deals with interdisciplinary practice combining the fields of religion and philosophy, a most challenging text for a newer indexer. The judges noted Jess’s work for its attention to detail in a book with many non-English terms and diacritics, and for the web of connections she built through many helpful cross-references, especially linking the foreign phrases to their English synonyms.
In response to the news of Jess’s award, the author, Oludamini Ogunnaike, wrote: “Jess was amazing. While doing the indexing, she caught several typos and mistakes in the text that the copyeditor and I had missed, and did a remarkable job tracing the arguments and concepts across the book, which is quite long and complicated—involving terms in Arabic, Yoruba, French, and English, and multiple conceptual traditions. Her index has made the book much easier to navigate and provided a sympathetic and insightful guide for readers. I was particularly impressed by the way she tracked distinct, but related concepts across the different traditions discussed, and represented both these distinctions and relations in the index. Ms. Klaasen-Wright was also incredibly professional and worked remarkably swiftly and carefully, I cannot recommend her work highly enough.”
With her undergraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan (major in English and minors in Spanish and psychology), Jess completed her indexing training at Simon Fraser University and then participated in the Mary Newberry Mentorship Program of the Indexing Society of Canada / Société canadienne d’indexation (ISC/SCI). In particular, Jess has appreciated the guidance of such well-known indexers as Noeline Bridge and Audrey McClelland.
Jess completed her first index in 2019 for a scholarly monograph on the history of magic in Elizabethan England. Since then, she has indexed books in local and oral history, biography, Black feminism and feminist theory, English literature, biblical studies, international relations, and agrarian politics and economics. In addition to indexing, she works as a freelance copy editor and proofreader. An active member of the ISC/SCI, she serves on the Society’s Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Committee (TIDE).
This is the seventh year that the international contest has been held by ICI, and the fifth time that a Canadian indexer has won the prize. For a list of previous winners, please see certifiedindexers.com.
Diversity in Canadian Publishing Bursary Award for 2020: Sandra Muchekeza
August 31, 2020, Toronto: The Indexing Society of Canada / Société canadienne d’indexation (ISC/SCI) is pleased to announce that Sandra Muchekeza is the 2020 ISC/SCI Diversity in Canadian Publishing Bursary Award recipient. The selection committee received ten applications, from which four applicants were shortlisted.
Sandra Muchekeza was born and raised in Kenya before moving to Australia for her Bachelor studies in Psychology. After completing her studies, she joined her family in Toronto, Canada where she started a career in Project Management in the not for profit sector. Over time, Sandra developed a keen interest in Diversity, Equality and Inclusion and works hard to ensure the voices of the marginalized are heard.
Sandra is currently the Executive Director at the Council of Canadians of African and Caribbean Heritage (CCACH) based in Edmonton, Alberta. CCACH supports activities that enhance the social, economic and educational life of African and Caribbean heritage communities in Edmonton. Passionate about the rights of women in every aspect of their lives, Sandra sits on the Board of YWCA Edmonton an organization that fights for the right to equal economic opportunities for women and girls and works towards ending gender-based violence.
Sandra loves the world of books so it is hardly a surprise that she and her sister founded a children’s books publishing company called Asili Kids. The company produces and distributes books which have content and characters that children of African heritage can identify with and introduces children from all over the world to African stories.
Married with two young boys Sandra loves spending quality time with her family, dabbling with photography, trying out new food recipes and of course, reading.
About the award
Since 2014, when the hashtag #weneeddiversebooks appeared, the Canadian publishing industry has slowly been waking up to both the lack of diverse voices and the demand for them. With this bursary, ISC/SCI aims to help achieve equality of opportunity for aspiring indexers belonging to underrepresented and/or marginalized groups. The bursary covers fees for an approved indexing program, two years of ISC membership with listing, and entry into the Mary Newberry Mentorship program.
Magpie Pins for Sale
At the ISC/SCI annual general meeting and conference in June 2009, Katherine Barber, founding editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary department of Oxford University Press, gave a fascinating talk on the history of the word “magpie” and what it has to do with indexing.
The magpie-indexing connection
The English language is flavoured by the many cultures that have held sway in that country over the course of time: Celts, Saxons, Romans, Vikings, French, and that motley crew of people known as “English”.
The French tended to squish Latin words that came into the language by removing consonants. So the Latin “pica” (magpie) became “pia” in French and then “pie” in English. We added “mag” so that now we have “magpie” to refer to the bird that collects bits and pieces of this and that to take to its nest, much as indexers take pieces of the book and put them in their index nest. So indexers are like human magpies.
The pie we eat is related, because pies began as a collection of many foods baked together in a crust. Reference books of feast days, themselves not unlike indexes, were also called “pies”, possibly because the black ink on white pages was reminiscent of the bird’s colouring.
One last surprising connection between indexes and magpies. A type of geographical index is a gazetteer. The word is derived from “gazette”, a 17th-century tabloid-style newspaper sold in Venice for a gazeta (penny), a word derived from gazza. You guessed it: gazza is Italian for magpie.
How to buy the pins
You will be able to buy them at local meetings and the national AGM and conference, and you can also order them by mail. For the last, shipping costs will comprise the price of a small bubble-wrap envelope and whatever Canada Post charges to mail to your area of the world; for specifics, and to order, contact the presidents.