Between October and November 2025, Prof. David Michelson served as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, within the framework of the EurAsia Transformations Cluster of Excellence. During his residency in Vienna, I had the pleasure of sitting down with him to discuss the evolution of his work and his latest digital infrastructure projects.
Our conversation is presented in two parts. The first revisits developments in Syriaca since the previous interviews. The second focuses specifically on the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library project and the importance of international collaboration to its success.
1. Welcoming Introduction
Professor Michelson, welcome to the Austrian Academy of Sciences and IMAFO as a visiting fellow within the Eurasian Transformation Cluster of Excellence project! Building on our previous interviews about Syriaca.org (here and here) and the New Working Group for Linked Manuscript Descriptions (here and here), could you tell our The Digital Orientalist readers about this current residency in Vienna and explain how it contributes to your work, especially to Digital Syriac Studies?
Prof. David Michelson: Great, this is a good question! So I suppose that I’ll obviously mention syriaca.org, which you’ve already mentioned, and the most recent project which I know you’ll ask about in a moment: the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library, or the digital version of William Wright’s catalog. And then the working group, which for now I would say our aim was to develop a union digital catalog for Syriac manuscripts. You know all of those projects that I’m involved in.
Syriaca.org actually just in 2025 had its 15th anniversary! So 15 years ago, we held our first planning meeting for it at Princeton University, and technically it had its origins in 2006 when Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent invited me to give a graduate student paper on the topic.
How does it relate to being here in Vienna? Well, I think that Vienna and Austria, in general, has one of the highest concentrations of Syriac scholars in Europe. Thinking about that made me want to come here. Of course, your own project on Syriac Liturgy is here at the Austrian Academy, Adrian Pirtea’s project is here, Grigory Kessel who has done so much for Syriac studies—including bibliography and manuscript studies—is here. And so many others; actually, I risk leaving someone out if I try to name all of them. You can count them all up and there are probably more Syriac scholars in Austria than maybe anywhere else in Europe.
I had to come and find out in person what people are doing to get to ask more detailed questions. So for example, this was the first time I really had paid attention to the TEI to PDF transforms that are part of your project, or talking with Adrian and being able to look at some spreadsheets in the background of his project. That’s one of the main goals: to come and have conversations with scholars about works in progress that you can’t find out from even their conference presentations. You have to be able to sit down over coffee at Café Exchange built right here into the ground floor of the Austrian Academy!
2. From Syriaca.org to Current Focus
In our 2021 posts on Syriaca.org, we discussed your role in establishing it as a “reference portal” for Syriac culture. Considering the growth of Syriac Digital Humanities since then, how has your perspective on the field evolved, and how would you currently define your core research focus as you embark on new projects?
Prof. David Michelson: These are fun questions! For me, thinking about the fact that it has been 15 years since the launch of Syriaca.org, the original purpose was to create a specialized research search engine. At the time, we were noticing that there were so many different Syriac digital projects that I wanted to build a search engine, but we realized actually that the field wasn’t ready for that yet. Before you could build a search engine, you had to build infrastructures and you had to build best practices.
So in some ways, what I am most excited about right now is a project we’re going to call “Syriaca.nexus”. It will be a specialized search engine that will allow researchers to look across different Syriac databases. If a researcher is interested in a particular Syriac figure or topic, they could come to this search engine and it would tell them: “In this project you’ll find 5 results, in that project 6 results,” and then take you to the individual projects. As you know, and as your The Digital Orientalist has well documented, there are so many projects now, and it’s difficult to even know: Is there already a database that I should be looking at, and how would I know where to find it? That’s really what I’m excited about for the next phase of Syriaca.org. We will be collaborating with any projects that are interested to help make those projects more discoverable through a sort of federated search, to use a library technical term.
3. The LOD Working Group Follow-Up
In 2022, we covered the Working Group for Linked Manuscript Descriptions, which aimed to develop a shared vocabulary for sharing Linked Data from Middle Eastern manuscripts. How is the new Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library (SMBL) project the practical fulfillment or ‘proof-of-concept’ of the goals established in that Working Group?
Prof. David Michelson: That’s a great question too: I love all of these questions! This in some ways fits with what I just mentioned about a “federated search.” One particular kind of search across different databases would be to search the different electronic manuscript catalogs and repositories. That was the goal of the working group, and that was the goal of the standards that we created for the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library.
Yes, our next goal will be to see how we could implement William Wright’s catalogue. I want to give him a lot of credit here. My coeditor has already been working with that working group. We continued working with some partners, and we’re very optimistic about creating the prototype of a union catalog that would let one search the major collections: HMML, Sinai, British Library, French Collections, etc. That’s what I’m hoping will come from that.
Now, I do have to mention an unfortunate downturn. The good news was we had a very large grant from the US federal government. The bad news is on April 1st, 2025, along with 100% of humanities funding in the US, our grant was canceled midstream. We still had a 6-figure funding amount and 18 months left on the grant, and all that was taken away. So we’re looking for new funding. We have some leads on that, but that obviously has set us back a little bit towards this final proof of concept.
Stay tuned for Part 2!
