Towards an Overhaul of a Website for Burmese Buddhist Manuscripts
by Arist Alfred Bravo
From September to December 2024, I had the fantastic opportunity to work on an upgraded version of the Myanmar Manuscript Digital Library (MMDL). The MMDL is a joint effort between Burmese Buddhist librarians and Western scholars, including scholars at the DSR. As a website, the MMDL’s goal is to store PDFs of the Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts in the librarians’ possession, so that those manuscripts become accessible to Buddhists and scholars worldwide. The September-December 2024 updates were made with this goal in mind.
The website updates’ priorities were to (1) create a Burmese version of the MMDL for Burmese users and (2) overhaul the website’s design so that it can be read on mobile devices. These priorities were especially considerate of Burmese Buddhists in Myanmar, who typically access the Internet through mobile phones and slower Internet connections. Increasing the MMDL’s accessibility was important for us, but we recognized that we needed further assistance to make that advancement.
As such, the MMDL team – represented by Professor Christoph Emmrich (DSR faculty), Dr. Anthony Scott (DSR alum and current postdoctoral researcher at IASA, University of Tokyo), Sai Oakar Aung (Toronto community leader and Burmese language instructor), and me – was extremely fortunate to be supported by the University of Toronto’s UX Design for DH Accelerator Program in 2024. This program provided the expertise of UX designer Meg Sanchez, software developer Matthew Lefaive, and manager Dr. Danielle Taschereau Mamers. With their guidance, we at the MMDL learned principles for updating the MMDL’s design to fit accessibility standards. We also workshopped various iterations of the website so that the best version of the website could be chosen for release in 2025.
What struck me most about the program’s work was how interdisciplinary it was, and I believe this phenomenon speaks strongly to the interdisciplinary nature of religion in the public sphere. We had the underlying belief that scholars have the moral responsibility to make accessible the objects of our research (Burmese Buddhist manuscripts) and to benefit the communities with which we work (Buddhists in Myanmar and the Burmese diaspora). However, that belief alone did not automatically translate to the website’s design. This was made clear to us by the program’s design team; for from the beginning of the program, the designers challenged us to think about Burmese Buddhist perspectives of navigating the MMDL website’s design.
For example, it was not enough to simply translate the website’s text to Burmese. Burmese people do not always read text with spaces between them, and the Burmese font can render incorrectly when there is not enough space allocated on a webpage. This meant that we were often experimenting with the website’s spacing and perception of spacing. After all, it was important to think about how different background colours and font colours could make Burmese text appear more or less squished! In this sense, our understanding of religious studies was merged with the designers’ disciplines of UX design and software engineering.
This project made me rethink the relationship between Burmese Buddhist texts and the medium through which they are publicly displayed. The way scholars present these texts is underscored by issues of design, accessibility, and software limitations. To present religion to the world is not to present it “neutrally” or “without bias.” Rather, there is always a sense in which the religion’s presentation is historically situated and influenced by one’s own decision-making processes – processes which make possible the idea that websites can be designed in different ways. As we open the work of religious studies to others, let us be mindful of this historical situation, one wherein we must take seriously the ethical relations between scholars, religious folk, and the public.
Arist Bravo is a graduate student at the Department for the Study of Religion. He joined the DSR as a graduate student in Fall 2025, but beforehand, he was a DSR undergraduate student. He wrote this article during that time. Arist is interested in the philosophy of religion, Buddhism in Burma, and methodological issues in the study of religion.