The Digital Mary Project

The Digital Mary Project is a collaborative venture between the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University and the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens with support from the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at Simon Fraser University. 

The initial aim of the collaboration was to build a comprehensive, open-access database with sophisticated search functions that would bring together all the artistic productions, artefacts, and built landscapes related to the early cult of the Virgin Mary into a single digital platform, which could serve as an archive for the vast material remains related to her cult from the Late Antique and Early Medieval Mediterranean Basin, North Africa, and West Asia – that is, the regions where the cult of Mary first emerged.

As the project evolved, however, we saw an opportunity to create a critical and reflexive space in which the database functions as a "living archive," which is open to critique and dialogue.