Multimodal manuscript representation: toward an open repository for manuscript research data

Abstract Research on historical manuscripts is increasingly supported by technical disciplines, which are used, for example, to digitally restore degraded text or to analyze the composition of inks, pigments, binders, and the materials constituting the manuscript’s support. The Centre of Image and Material Analysis in Cultural Heritage (CIMA) in Vienna is an inter-university research institution that fosters collaboration between philology and the natural sciences. CIMA has generated a large amount of diverse research data and findings concerning numerous manuscripts. These data exist in various formats and are distributed across different storage media at the participating institutions. This paper describes the conceptual framework and technical implementation of a digital research data repository designed for the long-term preservation and dissemination of CIMA’s large volumes of heterogeneous data. The repository provides the research data related to the examined manuscripts for download and reuse by interested users, in accordance with open-access principles. Furthermore, the diverse data are visualized through a user interface, presenting different research insights derived from a single physical manuscript. This multimodal representation of a manuscript is intended to serve as an accessible starting point for interdisciplinary investigation, data exploration, and teaching. Graphical abstract