What are the best indexes/TOCs/maps you've seen?

[jaredpereira]

Textual media (books, websites, newspapers), anything goes here! Probably even some twitter threads could fit under this prompt. I suspect there have been a lot of interesting mechanisms here, even disregarding the fancier hypertext stuff.

Some examples:

• Against Method has an “Analytical Index”, which is basically a sketch of the main argument together with page numbers.
  
  
• The Timeless Way of Building has a “Detailed Table Of Contents” and key points highlighted throughout the book in italics.
  
  
• This personal website’s about page has some pretty neat accordions for content.

[Brendan]

Love this! I haven’t read A Timeless Way of Building but I do have A Pattern Language and I think it’s very similar, very nicely structured book

The first one that came to mind for me is Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter, which has this great sequence of increasingly more detailed TOC / outline — “SynopsiS”, “Short Contents”, and “Long Contents”, which are 1, 2, and 4 pages long respectively, I just included the first page of each here (and yes all section titles are a pair of words both starting with “S” b/c Hofstadter is all about aesthetics and playful constraints, love it…)

A phrase I thought of for describing this is “textual progressive enhancement” — increasing levels of detail for mapping out the structure of a text.

Another I found with a cool format is Antifragile, which has this thing called “Chapter Summaries and Map”, basically just a detailed TOC but also highlights core terminology used in the book, by which chapters they appear in, for easy cross-reference w/ the glossary, which is cool

[Brendan]

Also, a few websites I think you’ll dig, found from browsing through my Pinboard bookmarks, with various cool index / table of contents mechanisms! —

• Panelcode: layout markup and visualization (cool markup language for abstractly visualizing layouts for various sorts of publishing projects)
• Ableton’s “Learning Music” book (click on the left sidebar for a nice pop-out table of contents view)
• The Appendix, Appendixed (behind the scenes on The Appendix’s new index, with some cool visualizations)
• Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science (click through any chapter + see a very cool outline of the sections it contains, with thumbnail images for each page!)
• The Local Yarn, keyword index (this is fun, personal site w/ book-like alphabetical index…no idea how the “page numbers” are calculated!)
• Metacademy (can browse by topic, courses, or — most interesting — view “roadmaps” guiding you through a sequence drawn from various sources)
• List of Physical Visualizations and Related Artifacts (not only is the collection itself super cool, it’s got a sweet timeline view where you can toggle different categories, and can also switch from “list view” w/ brief descriptions to “gallery view” with more condensed thumbnail tiles)

[kyle]

I don’t have anything to really contribute here but just wanted to say I’m SO INTO ALL OF THIS.