About the OMnibus of MANTRAMS

v0.1 (20 May 2026)

We will offer selective translations on the OMnibus as soon as possible.
Please reach out with urgent translation requests and we will do our best to accommodate them.

The OMnibus of MANTRAMS is the central digital humanities platform of the ERC Synergy Project MANTRAMS: Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia (2024-2030). Conceived as both a multimedia archive and a curated exhibition space, the OMnibus brings together audio, video, photography, ritual documentation, material culture, and digital media related to mantra practices across South Asia and beyond. The platform supports teaching, research and public engagement through searchable collections, interconnected metadata, and multimedia essays that allow users to explore the social, sensory, material, and political lives of mantras across different regions, traditions and media environments.

Rather than proposing a single definition of a mantra, the OMnibus embraces methodological and epistemological plurality, foregrounding diverse perspectives from scholars, practitioners, artists, and collaborators. Particular attention is given to questions of mediation, positionality, and access, as well as to the uneven social and digital infrastructures through which knowledge circulates globally. Designed as a multilingual and mobile-first resource, the OMnibus seeks to develop sustainable and citable forms of digital scholarship beyond the written text alone, while remaining attentive to the complex relational dimensions of working with ritual and religious materials.

At the same time, the OMnibus should not be understood as a complete or definitive representation of mantra traditions. What is currently visible represents a carefully curated and continuously evolving subset of a much larger research corpus. Rather than presenting a finished archive, the platform remains intentionally open, transparent and expandable as the MANTRAMS project develops further. As the project continues, the OMnibus will likewise grow as an evolving open-access resource for the future of mantra studies.

The OMnibus as Software

As a website and tool for data presentation, the OMnibus of MANTRAMS is a heavily customized instance of the CollectionBuilder-CSV template. It thus leverages all the upsides of static web development (sustainability, few dependencies, possibilities of customization and many more) under a Minimal Computing framework.

Our intended audiences — scholars, mantra practitioners and investigators of mantra — vary greatly in terms of infrastructural support for access to a digital research output like the OMnibus of MANTRAMS. We navigate complex ethical and methodological frameworks that sometimes impact and sometimes center on the OMnibus. We still intentionally and gladly publish this resource early in the project runtime because we value Open Science, transparency and public feedback.

The OMnibus is developed and maintained by a very small technical staff located at the Digital Humanities Center of University of Tübingen. Kindly consider that this is a evolving resource, not just as a database, but also in terms of functionality, layout, usability, and network transmission optimization. We intend to push this light-weight framework as far as we can to provide an immersive and multilingual yet easy-to-use resource. This process, however, will take time and many iterations.

Please take into consideration that as long as no version 1.0 is published, the fundamental OMnibus infrastructure might still be subject to change, possibly effecting hyperlinks. If you use our material, do cite the DOIs from FDAT instead and consider creating screen recordings or archived version using e. g. the Internet Archive.

Feel free to reach out with questions anytime: edda.schwarzkopf@uni-tuebingen.de.