Why you should upload your videos to Academia.edu, not youtube.

In April 2020, I uploaded a video to youtube called “An 18th century Palestinian Diary Stolen by Israel.”

The video was about an 18th century manuscript from Ramla, Palestine. I partially transcribed the manuscript, and wanted to share it with the world so someone might finish it. An open source history project!

The video got some views. Some people liked it. But I still thought the manuscript was a diary.

Then, earlier this week (January 2021), Academia.edu rolled a new feature — video uploads. You can upload a video to your Academia.edu profile. (Disclosure: I work at Academia.edu).

So I uploaded the same video to Academia.edu, “The 18th Century Palestinian Diary of Yusuf Jahshan.”

Turns out, a bunch of Middle East historians — or anyone else following me on Academia — got a notification about my video. I know this because I built the notification. Anyways, two days later, one of them sent me a message:

Regarding “The 18th Century Palestinian Diary of Yusuf Jahshan” — it’s not a diary, but an apocalyptic prophecy (*malḥama*, as your transcription indicates, moreover, one that is attributed to the prophet Daniel). Since you have written about natural disasters, you might be interested in reading the following: Kristine Chalyan-Daffner, “‘Natural’ Disasters in the Arabic Astro-Meteorological Malḥama Handbooks,” in Historical Disaster Experiences (Cham, Switzerland, 2007), 207–223 (on a 16th century Egyptian work); and for medieval malḥama treatises, see David Cook, “An Early Muslim Daniel Apocalypse,” Arabica, 49, 1 (2002): 55–96; David Cook (ed. and trans.), The Book of Tribulations: The Syrian Muslim Apocalyptic Tradition. An Annotated Translation by Nu’aym b. Hammad al-Marwazi (Edinburgh, 2017). This genre circulated, as far as I know, among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

My heart skipped a beat. My fingers started typing the URL where I stored the transcript, middleastonight.com, faster than Apple’s keyboard could execute my command. And that’s because whoever designed the 2019 Macbook Pro Keyboard should be subject to cruel and unusual punishment.

But there it was, the first sentence of the manuscript:

نبتدي بتاييد القدس العالية نكتب كتاب ملحمة دانيال وكتاب الااثي عشرة

The manuscript I thought was Jahshan’s diary was actually the Epic of Daniel. It’s still unclear to me why I didn’t read the first sentence of the manuscript.

Anyways, in the Islamic Middle Ages, as knowledgable Middle East historians know well, “the word Malḥama referred to a writing of a divinatory character, as in the Malḥamat Dāniyāl” [Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition].

Anyways, this is a very round about way of saying that I’m a fucking idiot.

Now, I don’t mean to belabor this point — because it is arguably the main takeaway of this blog post.

But I do think there’s a silver lining to this cloud. Which is that, it makes a lot more sense for academics to upload videos to Academia, where they can oxygenate and find the audience they deserve — and in my case get peer reviewed and quickly removed for being misleading — than it does for them to live next to a live stream of a pet hamster unlearning heteronormative gender pronouns.

Thanks for tuning in!