A little context (if this is rehash for you, apologies): right now, we have an index of people’s names. I’m working on what I think is the next largest index, that of places. The way they work is twofold: we have the index page and, for each name we have a page of search results, displaying all the paragraphs in which said name appears, with the name itself in red.

Two (edit: three) questions have arisen with regard to the places index.

1. Some places that Boccaccio refers to are named something else now, something entirely different (for example, the former Trojan colony in Sicily that they called Acesta is now apparently called Calatafimi). How do we deal with that? The options, as I see them, are:

• Make Boccaccio’s name the primary index entry, and create another entry – unlinked to any page of search results – that says “see Acesta.”
• Make Boccaccio’s name the primary index entry and put an annotation into the text itself, noting the present-day name of the place. The drawback to this is that, if the place is mentioned several times, the annotator would have to first search for all its occurrences, and then link the annotation to all the relevant paragraphs. Might prove cumbersome, but also perhaps useful for the reader’s context.
• Index only the modern spellings of the place names, and Boccaccio’s spellings will show up in the search results page that lists all the paragraphs where a particular name occurs. Drawback is, if someone reads a place name in the text and wants to use the index to find its other occurrences, there’s no way to do that.
  • Unless! we make all the encoded names within the text not only colored, but also links to the same search results page where you arrive if you click on a name in the index. Which may be a good idea in any case: again, if a reader wants to see where a particular name occurs, they could do it straight from the text without going to the index, if they prefer.

My instinct is to go with the first option, possibly keeping in mind option 3.5. Anyone have opinions?

2. There are several seas mentioned. Sometimes they are called “mar[e] YYY” and sometimes just “il/l’YYY.” Do they get indexed under M (mare Egeo), or under their names (Egeo, mare or just Egeo)?

2a. My pipe dream in this regard is to eventually have indicators for every place name of what kind of place it is. But perhaps that’s for later.

3. Inferno/hell has several different names, including for example Baratro and Tartaro. Should we have all of the “variants” refer to the main entry inferno?

There’ll surely be other questions, but these are the most immediate. Thoughts?