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[caption id="attachment_134" align="alignnone" width="719"] Geographical dispersion of autograph manuscripts of Ibn Ṭūlūn[/caption]How do you picture the work in the archives? Dusty pages, creaking in the half-light of old halls of knowledge? Bent-over people shuffling their feet between rows of shelves? The creaking of a microfilm viewer seeming deafening in a silence otherwise interrupted only by occasional coughs? It is probably all happening somewhere and might be a strong impetus behind advocation for the digitization of primary sources.Yet, the work in the archives is also one of the most intriguing parts of an historian's work. There you encounter the handwriting of a scholar whose ideas you have followed for so long, and the manuscript closes the gap in time, occasionally bearing traces of its own travels and trajectories through time and space (the result looks a lot like space as well, with stars and planets).One interesting aspect of Ibn Ṭūlūn's autograph corpus is that most of what survives are rather small-scale writings. In several cases, these are found within one volume entirely consisting of his own works. Moreover, between these volumes there are occasionally several autographs of the same work. And these – both textual and material items – are today dispersed in libraries in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Ireland, and the United States (more copies in other hands are found elsewhere). In order to make sense of the connections between manuscripts, on one hand, and texts, on the other, as well as their locations today, I have used Palladio.The present post tries to convey this excitement through the use of visualizations of the dispersion of Ibn Ṭūlūn's works and codices . I have used Palladio, a network visualization software created at Stanford University. It is platform independent and runs in your browser. It is less powerful than other network analysis and visualization software but it allows you to get results in your first day, which can be very motivational. There is also a good tutorial by Marten Düring, which leads you through the first steps. For the first steps of setting up a Palladio project, you should refer to those sites.My own project consists of three csv sheets (the full json project file cannot be uploaded here):Manuscripts Ibn Tulun-Tabelle 1 Works Ibn Tulun-Tabelle 1 Relations-Tabelle 1Follow Fig. 1 (left to right) in uploading them. The figure also shows the connections ("extension") you should create between them: Manuscripts should be connected to call number, and key should connect in tables Works and Relations.[caption id="attachment_123" align="aligncenter" width="648"] Fig. 1: Palladio project start screen[/caption]The following visualizations have been created using the graph function. The first image shows the collections which hold Ibn Ṭūlūn autographs and which hold overlapping works. The figure was created by using Place as Source and Place_2 as Target.[caption id="attachment_122" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Fig. 2: Connections between collections, created through holding of identical works.[/caption]The Dār al-Kutub, Cairo, and the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, clearly emerge as the main collections for Ibn Ṭūlūn autographs, with Alexandria, Leiden, and the Staatsbibliothek Berlin trailing.[caption id="attachment_130" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Fig. 3: Manuscripts held in collections and overlaps in contained works.[/caption]Figure 3 makes the interconnections between the holdings of the two main collections even more obvious. Among the manuscripts held by either are several works that can be found in manuscripts of the other as well. The Princeton cluster, which now appears more prominent, contains several fragments or other drafts of texts, held at either Dublin or Cairo, as Kristina Richardson has recently proved. The British Library, London, is connected to this through their one partial autograph, whose remaining volumes are held in Cairo. The size of the Leiden cluster derives from the fact that each text is counted as one manuscript, even though some only count 5 folios.[caption id="attachment_131" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Fig. 4: Fig. 3: Works held in collections and overlaps through appearing in other manuscripts.[/caption]The centrality of the Cairo connection becomes yet clearer if we switch the focus from manuscript codices to individual works. Dār al-Kutub holds the largest number of Ibn Ṭūlūn's multiple-text manuscripts (MTM), which each contain up to more than ten titles. (I have used reference keys here, since titles are too long to display and Palladio does not allow for proper transliteration. But I am not talking about content here, anyway.) For the same reason, the Alexandria collection (holding only one MTM) draws almost even with the one in Leiden.Also, the overlap between the Cairo and Dublin collections is now so strong that reading anything becomes difficult (also within the Cairo cluster). Therefore, I have included one last figure. This shifts the focus from the collections to the direct relations between works and manuscripts. In this case, I have used Palladio's facet filters to consider only those manuscripts held in Cairo, Dublin, and Princeton. Figure 5 is, however, only a limited screenshot which captures the most interesting cases of overlap between – and within – these collections.[caption id="attachment_129" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Fig. 5: Manuscripts held at Cairo, Dublin, Princeton, containing identical textual items (dark dots are manuscripts, light dots works).[/caption]Three out of four MTMs held in Dublin (MS CBL...) have strong overlaps with Cairene manuscripts (MTMs from the Taymur Pasha collection, MS TayMa...). And also within the Taymur collection, the MTMs 759 and 373 share 11 identical items  between them.&#160;