An example of a subject index to ethnographic fieldnotes

Indexes of these kinds are only useful as a guide for what is to be found in a large corpus of field notes or rough tape transcripts. 

Whatever system used (by hand or computerized) the process involves reading the corpus, identify passages (generally a few lines long) that appear to be in some way relevant to some topic, identify this topic with a name or short phrase, and then keep track of the topic.  This process can be referred to as "indexing" (my preferred form), "coding" or "categorizing." (Check example.)

What is most important is to realize that, at this stage,  the individual entries (e.g. "school," "housing," "dogs," "class consciousness) are pre-theoretical (or a-theoretical). In other words they are based on the common sense of the researcher as a help in the main analytic process. It is however the case that indexing is an analytic step that can easily come to hide aspects of what was given in the field (the "data") that might have been useful.  Indexing should be iterative.

Such indexes are meant to be manipulated and changed.

The first version of the index has been alphabetized (useful when checking whether an entry already exists). Furthermore, some of the entries have been subindexed so that closely related entries can appear close to each other (e.g. entries about the pubs I got to know). The second is ordered by entry number (useful when adding entries)

Alphabetic index
Numbered index
October 4, 1996