Project Investigator: Racha Kirakosian, Associate Professor of German and the Study of Religion
The Exploring Medieval Mary Magdalene project is an online collection of digital editions containing the legend of Mary Magdalene’s conversion. The project began as the focus of a year-long graduate student seminar held in Harvard’s German Department and conducted by Professor Racha Kirakosian. This team of philologists and digital humanists has made available the linguistically diverse manuscripts containing this little-known legend in an interactive and fully-searchable format that surpasses the limitations of traditional printed critical editions.
The project employs IIIF in two different ways. Firstly, the team created TEI-XML transcriptions using an online TEI Web Editor which presented zoomable IIIF images with Mirador alongside an editing interface. Secondly, the digital editions interface includes Mirador viewers for each manuscript alongside highly interactive digital transcriptions and translations. IIIF allows readers of the editions to experience the materiality of each edition and compare those images to the TEI editions of each text. The TEI Editor was originally developed by Jeffrey Witt, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland, and customized by Harvard University Arts & Humanities Research Computing (DARTH); the digital editions interface was developed by DARTH.
