Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) Project

The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary digital humanities project (PEMM) is a comprehensive resource for the miracle stories about the Virgin Mary in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Egypt, and preserved in Gəˁəz parchment manuscripts between 1300 and the present. Directed by Prof. Wendy Laura Belcher and then managed by Evgeniia Lambrinaki, PEMM was launched in March 2018, using as its base the miracle story identifications William F. Macomber made in the 1980s.

Dataset. PEMM 2.0 includes the data collected by the project in Google Sheets from its inception to July 4, 2023. This date marked the end of our use of Google Sheets as our database and the end of Jeremy Brown's full-time involvement with the project (when he moved to be the cataloger of Ethiopic manuscripts at HMML). This data includes 1,002 identified stories (or 940 separate stories) (called Canonical Stories); 549 stories translated into English (288 stories translated by PEMM team; 223 stories translated and published by others) and another 200 stories summarized; 676 fully cataloged manuscripts (with another 334 identified, but awaiting digitization) (in Gəˁəz and a few in Arabic) (called Manuscripts); 51,690 stories documented in those manuscripts (called Story Instances); 21,403 typed Gəˁəz incipits (unique first lines) for those stories; and 2,547 paintings with 4,205 scenes in 262 manuscripts (called Paintings). The manuscripts come from 92 repositories and libraries around the world (called Collections) and the stories were composed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Egypt (and probably Nubia, although not confirmed), as well as Europe and the Levant (called Story Origins).

Database. The PEMM Project began by using Google Sheets as a lightweight relational database. To learn about this innovative digital humanities approach by Princeton’s CDH’s, read the “Is a Spreadsheet a Database?” (February 21, 2021) article by PEMM lead developer, Rebecca Sutton Koeser. Due to our extremely large dataset (7 Google sheets in one workbook, each with at least 40 columns, and one with 50,000 rows, with dozens of complex formulas linking the fields in the various sheets), Google Sheets would repeatedly hang up. So, in July we migrated all our data to an Aurora PostgreSQL database, accessing it with a content management system called Directus. However, this Zenodo dataset represents the data as it last appeared in Google Sheets.

Website. The current PEMM website (not yet its web application and data portal) is at https://pemm.princeton.edu. We will launch the full web application and data portal in mid-fall 2023.

Team. PEMM was created in collaboration with Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities (mainly with Rebecca Sutton Koesser, Jean Bauer, and Nicholas Budak, but with additional support from Gissoo Doroudian, Rebecca Munson [of beloved memory], and Kevin McElwee); directed by Prof. Wendy Laura Belcher; managed primarily by Evgeniia Lambrinaki into mid-2022 and then by Blaine Kebede; contributed to by catalogers Jeremy Brown, Mehari Worku, Dawit Muluneh, Solomon Gebreyes, Vitagrazia Pisani, Ekaterina Pukhovaia, and Steve Delamarter; web programmed by Henok Alem, who was assisted by Pak Hei Li, Ayomikun M. Gbadamosi, and Marew Masresha; edited by Taylor Eggan, assisted by Bret Windhauser; assisted by Hanni Makonnen for geolocating; typed by volunteers (including Mihret Melaku, Tariku Abas Sherif, Beimnet Beyene Kassaye, Annabel S. Lemma, Tsega-ab Hailemichael, Chiara Lombardi, and Ellen Perleberg); and translatated and/or summarized by Princeton undergraduates (including Lauren D. Johnson, Sana Khan, Jason O. Seavey, Leia R. Walker, Nati Arbelaez Solano, Daniel Somwaru, Mika J. Hyman, Grace Matthews, Allie V. Mangel, Ellen Li, Elliot Galvis). Support at Princeton is provided by Michael Franz and Amanda M. Arcamone.

Partners. Among its board members are Elias Wondimu, Melaku Terefe, Solomon Gebreyes, Eyob Derillo, Meron Gebreananaye, Sofanit T. Abebe, Habte Michael Kidane, Hagos Abrha, Mussie Berhe, Woldesemait Teklehaymanot, and Alessandro Bausi. Among PEMM’s institutional partners are Beta Maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea at the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies of the Universität Hamburg, created and directed by Principal Investigator Alessandro Bausi; Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, led by Father Columba Stewart; and the British Library, Asian and African Collections, with Eyob Derillo as cataloger.

Internal Funding. PEMM’s first and second phase were made possible by the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities, directed by Meredith Martin, and its team of Natalia Ermolaev, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Gissoo Doroudian, Rebecca Munson (of beloved memory), Nick Budak, and Kevin McElwee. The second phase was supported by a CDH Research Partnership grant. The third phase was funded by the Princeton Humanities Council, executive directed by Kathleen Crown, through the David A. Gardner Innovation Grants for New Projects in the Humanities, and the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Other important funders throughout were the Princeton Department of African American Studies, directed by the Eddie S. Glaude, as well as the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies (directed by Wallace Best), the Program in African Studies (directed by Emmanuel Kreike and now Chika Okeke-Agulu), the Center for the Study of Religion (directed by Jonathan Gold), and the Department of Comparative Literature (directed by Thomas Hare).

External funding. PEMM’s fourth phase was made possible by two major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, awarded for work from fall 2021 through summer 2024. In the 1970s, NEH provided funding for the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library (EMML), which microfilmed thousands of manuscripts in Ethiopia, which serve as the backbone for the PEMM project. Today, the NEH Scholarly Editions and Scholarly Translations Grant funds the team of experienced researchers with rare language skills to catalog stories in parchment manuscripts, translate stories into English, and write short introductions to them. The NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant funds a public-facing open-access web application and data portal to share the stories in, images about, translations of, and scholarship on this crucial body of medieval African literature and to build upon our innovative prototype tool for searching in Gəˁəz.