Membra Dispersa Sinaitica: Looking Back on One Year

1. Today is the 6th International Provenance Research Day, which provides a good opportunity to look back on the first year of Membra Dispersa Sinaitica and give a kind of annual report of the project. I should emphasise here that it is (so far) not supported by any external funding and is run on my own initiative and in my spare time, mostly while commuting to my workplace. The goals I have set myself could therefore only be fairly low. But I’m very pleased that one of the main goals has already been realised particularly well in the first year: namely to create a platform for the exchange of information about the dispersed manuscripts of St Catherine’s Monastery and network with others interested in this topic.

2. The first post went online on 15 April 2023 and was very well received. The announcement on (then still) Twitter had over 10K impressions and the website was visited over 500 times in April 2023 alone. It was particularly pleasing that Alice I. Sullivan (Tufts University) immediately added it to the Additional Resources page on sinaiarchive.org. In addition to the great feedback, readers also expressed criticism in a polite way. For instance, in my first post I had labelled Vladimir Beneshevich as a “Soviet Byzantinist”, which is more than unfortunate in view of the fact that Beneshevich was executed by the Soviet regime in 1938. As I wasn’t aware of Beneshevich’s fate until then, I deleted the attribute “Soviet”, which was unnecessary anyway.¹ Due to the limited time I have for the project and the fact that I have to acquire new knowledge for almost every post (as well as the fact that I am a human person), minor and major errors are unavoidable. I am therefore grateful when this is pointed out to me. A content related change was necessary here. However, even more formal and technical adjustments had to be made throughout the year, which I will come to below.

3. A further 13 posts were published in the first year. Of these, 7 were dedicated to highlighting new research. In order to minimise effort, however, I will probably not keep this category and instead post reviews of important literature from time to time. 6 posts presented original research and I am pleased that one of these posts was guest authored by Georgi Parpulov. I would like to take this opportunity to invite researchers working on the manuscripts of the Sinai Monastery, especially its diaspora manuscripts, to get in touch if they have something of interest they could imagine seeing published here. This could also be a collaborative post or a reply to one of my posts.

4. Over the last year, I have also tried to promote the project on various social media platforms, including Twitter (now X), BlueSky, and Facebook. Due to the extremely worrying developments on X/Twitter, I was several times on the verge of closing my account (as numerous colleagues have in fact done). On the other hand, it’s still the platform on which direct and quick exchange and networking work best. So, I’m still undecided and a bit at a loss here, but I have significantly reduced my activity on X/Twitter. In happier news, Membra Dispersa Sinaitica was briefly mentioned in the German podcast Geschichten aus der Geschichte (although it’s of course not true that the project is only about Greek manuscripts). At the end of November 2023, I also had the opportunity to present the project for the first time at a workshop hosted by the Academy project Bibliotheca Arabica in Leipzig (see fig. 2).²

5. In order to ensure the best possible citation of the individual posts, a number of conceptual decisions had to be made right from the start. The first decision was to implement the project on the hypotheses.org platform, which has established a respectable network of academic blogs and provides free support. In January 2024, Membra Dispersa Sinaitica was also added to the OpenEdition catalogue, which facilitates better indexing in search engines and findability in other catalogues. Secondly, I have worked with numbered paragraphs, which can not only be cited like the pages of an article, but can also be linked. Thirdly, a citation is suggested at the end of each post. I have also uploaded a PDF version of each post (except those on new research) to hcommons.org, which assigns them a DOI. Since January 2024, Hypotheses has been assigning DOIs itself and automatically adds a citation box to each post. This welcome feature has unfortunately led to some posts now having two DOIs. I had to make an adjustment here: The original citation boxes now only contain a reference to the Creative Commons licence under which a post was published (and a link to download the PDF version). I only recently started working with Creative Commons licences because a blog post of one of my colleague’s was plagiarised. The licence certainly won’t protect against plagiarism, but it does make explicit which rights I grant when someone wants to use the material published here. Another adjustment concerns references in posts. So far I have always referred to the Bibliography, but I think that it is certainly better for readers if they can look up the literature in the post itself (especially since much of it is accessible online and can be linked).

6. The Bibliography page is one of three resource pages I have set up to accompany the blog. The other two are dedicated to Manuscripts and Collectors and Dealers. The Bibliography now contains 306 entries (as of 10 April 2024) and I have already used it several times myself as an aid in my research (I would of course be curious to know if others have done the same). In the meantime, I have sorted the entries according to the three categories “Manuscript Catalogues and Other Aides“, “Bibliographical and Biographical Sources“, and “Studies“. The Collectors and Dealers page has changed the least over the last year. It contains the names of 42 persons (as of 3 October 2023) who were directly involved in the dispersion of Sinaitic manuscripts. This list may look unimpressive, but it is nevertheless remarkable, because until now I had not realised just how many names we know and within which historical periods these people were active. One task that arises directly from this concerns the investigation of possible networks among these persons.

7. Finally, the Manuscripts page is the page I have experimented with the most, without being yet satisfied with the results. Each of the 163 manuscripts or fragments listed so far (as of 11 January 2024) now has an entry with some basic data (where I got round to filling it in). I have also tried to add an identifier to each item (if it is hyperlinked, it currently leads to all posts in which the respective manuscript is mentioned). In most cases, assigning individual identifiers is not a problem. However, there are also manuscripts where a shelfmark conceals dozens of codicological units, each of which is an individual item in its own right. A kind of database has thus been created in its absolute raw version and I can see that an enormous amount of time would have to be invested here to convert this into a proper and comprehensive database. This page will for now remain unfinished (see below) and will probably be simplified again this year. Still, some preliminary results can already be extracted here too. The data collected thus far can be used to provide an overview of all (known) collections containing Sinaitic manuscripts (see fig. 3). This overview is probably quite complete already and offers something that was not available before. It shows impressively the extent of the dispersion of Sinaitic manuscripts.

8. The resource pages are an important aspect of this project that clearly goes beyond academic blogging. It is important to me to run this project as a form of public scholarship and thus consciously transcend the boundaries of purely academic discourse. As part of my presentation in Leipzig I also thought about other forms of conceptualising this work. What I found particularly intriguing was the notion of public note-taking.³ As I wrote in my first post, one of the motivations for starting this blog was that since 2016 I had collected notes on dispersed Sinaitic manuscripts and wanted to bring this material together somewhere. Note-taking can, of course, be found in many areas. In primarily text-based research, it is usually a form of informal writing that serves formal writing (publishing). Informal notes are personal and generally not accessible to other parties, unless you share your notes with a colleague, which in my experience is not uncommon.

9. What I find interesting about scholarly informed public note-taking are these two points of informality and accessibility. Admittedly, the posts on this page are not entirely informal notes, but they are not entirely formal either (in the sense of e.g. peer-reviewed publications). They are observations that could perhaps be the building blocks of a formal publication. At the same time, they are public and therefore accessible. Their public nature is intended to introduce an element of interactivity. This is possible in direct form via comments (as with the usual blog). In many cases, however, I have also involved people from whom I obtain information (other researchers, librarians, archivists) in the writing process and, as a result, have sometimes heavily rewritten posts before they went online. In this way, my personal notes become public notes, which are also shaped by others. The main advantage of this form of public note-taking in my view is the learning process that is fostered by daring to make “unfinished” things public. My hope is that this will not only be accepted by the community, but will also be useful for everyone concerned with the topic of this project.

Published: 10 April 2024. Last updated: 12 April 2024. License: CC BY-NC. Download PDF

1. However, my attention was then also drawn to a German translation of a CV of Beneshevich written in Russian after 1934, in which he describes himself as a “Soviet scholar”. See L. Burgmann, “Hommage à Vladimir Nikolaevic Beneševič”, Rechtshistorisches Journal, 7 (1988), pp. 3-12, at pp. 6-11. Strictly speaking, the attribute was historically correct, but retrospectively it still gives the wrong impression. [↩]
2. This trip to Leipzig also gave me the opportunity to have a look at the Eastern Christian manuscripts that Constantin Tischendorf brought back from the Middle East and which were acquired by the University Library after his death in 1873. I will summarise what I learned from these manuscripts in a separate post. [↩]
3. See this recent case study, which starts with a helpful review of the literature on public note-taking: Elina Salomaa, Esa Lehtinen, “Public note-taking on a digital platfiorm as a workplace practice“, Discourse Studies, 25/6 (2023), pp. 775-798, esp. pp. 775-777. [↩]

---

---