PEMM Wins Another Digital Humanities Award
By Wendy Laura Belcher
January 2, 2025
PEMM has won the 2025 Medieval Academy of America Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize, to be awarded at the conference in March 2025.
The award reads:
The committee for the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025 award goes to the Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) project, a web resource crafted by a truly impressive, cross-institutional team under the direction of Professor Wendy Laura Belcher. The resource allows visitors to explore an extraordinary number of texts and images about the Virgin Mary created in these African countries since 200 CE, with a focus on one of the most important collections of such stories, the group of Ethiopian Marian miracles called The Miracles of Mary.
The site is perhaps the only large-scale medieval African text digital humanities project in existence. For that alone, the project would be worthy of this prize. However, the resource created by the team over the course of five years provides users with an easily accessible gateway into an astounding depiction of cultural heritage, thanks to its meticulously built relational database and easily navigable user interface. This project opens the door to exploration by students, scholars, and the general public, but perhaps most importantly, as the site’s creators say, to the stories’ original creators: the peoples from the Horn of Africa. PEMM provides Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Egyptians with digital access to their cultural heritage.
The committee acknowledges the complexity associated with the scale of this project, with over 2 million pieces of metadata. We were deeply impressed by the accessibility and sustainability of the site’s architecture and design. The committee was also deeply impressed by the project’s commitment to open dissemination of data and to the ongoing support of the project by Princeton University Library and its many partners and contributors. This project truly achieves the most important goals of digital resources: sustainability, usability, and a commitment to the ongoing preservation and access to often-overlooked and unknown stories, texts, and histories. We applaud this monumental achievement.
