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Joins: two fragments of the same manuscript that time and entropy have pulled asunder, and modern scholars have matched, like Aristophanes’s soulmates.
2/They can be housed in different libraries, or on different shelves in the same library. They will never again be whole, except digitally.
3/Computer vision algorithms have made it possible to find more joins than human visual memory alone used to allow. But finding a join is still rare, and a join is worth publishing and worth crediting by name to the person who matched the fragments.
4/In my field, we publish joins with a plus sign (+) between the manuscript identification numbers (classmarks). So ENA 4020.41 + T-S Misc. 27.3.2 is a join between fragments in collections in New York and Cambridge.
5/This week someone asked me whether the fragments of a new join get reclassified and housed together in the same binders under new classmarks.
6/The answer is no, they don’t. They stay physically separated. I thought about why, and it made me think (again) about archiving practices and historical reconstruction and how they’re related.
7/Reclassifying parts of a join under a single classmark would be satisfying. It’s nice when puzzle pieces get fitted back together. But it would also erase a different history: the long period of their separation.
8/When I was starting out as a historian, I thought my job was to restore the past to its pristine state. I would gladly have undone the recent past if it meant restoring a more ancient one.
9/But if the twin motors of history are contingency and change, we don’t get to stop the engine.
10/It’s common for historically minded scholars to seize on the endpoint of research as its sole goal. But that can foreclose other interesting questions. Even the research process itself can and should be studied.
