Feedback Form

Do you have feedback on the site, positive or negative? Use the PEMM Feedback Form to let us know about any bugs you found, incorrect information, incomplete information, and/or request features. 

We are also grateful for any additional information. For instance, if you are a scholar of Marian stores from Europe, did you notice that we had wrongly listed a story's origin? Please use the form to let us know what you noticed.

Research

Have you done some research on one of these stories, paintings, or manuscripts on the PEMM website? Would you like to share your research with others? Please apply to have your research loaded to the site as a Research Post by writing to pemm@princeton.edu.

Media Inquiries

We welcome coverage by the Ethiopian and Eritrean media. Please contact us at the PEMM project email: pemm@princeton.edu. 

Volunteering

We do not currently have funding for other workers, but we do welcome those who would like to volunteer on the project. If you are interested, please fill out the form the PEMM Volunteering Form. Students in the US from the Horn of Africa are especially encouraged to volunteer.

We have a few unpaid internships for students (high school, college, graduate study) with good wifi connections and at least one of the skills listed in the form and below.

On the technical side, the project provides opportunities for volunteers in computer science and/or computational linguistics to work on developing search capability for a rare alphabet (Ge`ez or classical Ethiopic). It also provides opportunities for those who want to work on traditional app development with a focus on serving users in the US and the Horn Africa by following the principles of localization and minimal computing. Later, we will need beta testers.

On the humanities side, the project provides opportunities for volunteers with superior Gəˁəz and English to work on translating stories from Gəˁəz into English and with superior Amharic and English to work on translating stories from Amharic into English and instructions from English into Amharic. US students without this knowledge but who have family members who have this knowledge are encouraged to team up with those family members to do this work. Partnering among the generations is something we hope to encourage.

The project also provides opportunities for volunteers with local knowledge of Ethiopian/Eritrean rural, church, and monastic settings to work on identifying themes and objects in manuscript paintings (again, US students may want to pair with family members to do this).

The project also provides opportunities to volunteers with good online research skills to identify the national origin of stories and to those willing to do the repetitive but essential work of counting the number of lines and characters in manuscripts.

Finally, on the digital humanities side, the project provides opportunities for volunteers to work on a folksonomy  (controlled vocabulary) for story and painting keywords.

History of Volunteering

PEMM emerges from East Africans’ passion for their own cultural heritage and is founded on a volunteer community of immigrants from the Horn of Africa in the U.S. working on their own patrimony. PEMM’s collection stage successfully engaged the imagination of East African community members all over the world, from high schoolers and college students to graduate students and faculty. PEMM put out a call in spring 2020 for volunteers with knowledge of the Ethiopic alphabet to type incipits. Dozens volunteered, including those at universities in Ethiopia, in part because these stories are central to the daily felt and religious life of 50 million Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Christians. Since then we have had high school, undergraduate, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers from Germany, Italy, Ethiopia, and across the United States steadily working on the project. PEMM serves a dual purpose, providing access to materials of interest to those from the Horn of Africa but also calling on their rare skills in understanding them. This involvement of young Black scholars collaborating from all over the world is one of the most exciting features of PEMM.