Workflows help in understanding how a particular project came about. Furthermore, they allow for replication and adoption of the same in developing similar projects. However, most projects in Digital Humanities seldom express their workflows openly, particularly those in the field of digital heritage. The implicit choices in image capture, authoring, contextual modeling, and user evaluation, if recorded for future use, can aid others invested in similar works. Through this paper, the workflow for developing a virtual tour for a cultural heritage object — namely Kerala mural paintings — are documented for future use. Kerala mural paintings are artworks emerging from Kerala, which is the southernmost state of India. For the scope of this study the virtual tour of one temple in central Kerala, the Chemmanthatta Mahadeva Temple, Thrissur is created and a survey is embedded within it to learn about audience conception of concepts such as aura, authenticity, and sacredness.

The workflow pipeline is constructed in such a way that it can be considered to comprise of five documented stages: (1) ethical capture — at this initial stage, permission from the governing bodies of the temple were sought out. Since the temple was under local governance and also maintained by Archaeological Survey of India(ASI), Thrisure circle, permissions needed to be sought. With the necessary permissions in place, 360° images were captured, strictly adhering to ASI guidelines as well as temple decorum rules; (2) contextual authoring — after the first step, the images captured were imbibed with its context and stitched together to form the 360° tour. For this purpose Affinity Photo 2 image editing software was used to do minor edits in the images. Followed by that, the images were imported into Articulate Storyline 360 to stitch together the visuals into a virtual tour. This contained contextual information on the temple architecture, as well as annotations for mural iconography. The temple’s spatial logic was carefully retained; (3)evaluation instrumentation—the virtual tour was subjected to testing on audience perceptions of aura, authenticity, and sacredness in a virtual environment. This was assessed using an integrating a standardized survey (Likert scales for aura/presence, sacredness/reverence, authenticity/fidelity + open-ended comparison prompts) directly into the end of the tour; (4)deployment and data collection—the tour was then hosted on the web with analytics tracking dwell time/paths, collecting n=100 anonymized responses; (5) analysis and archiving—the descriptive statistics were exported as a CSV file and qualitative coding was carried out on NVivo software.

This workflow addresses DARIAH's call for reproducible research practices by making explicit the "hidden costs" of sacred heritage digitization: balancing visual fidelity with ritual context, navigating community consent for devotional content, and designing evaluation instruments sensitive to cultural concepts like darśan.

Methodological contributions include a reusable survey template for aura/authenticity and an open Storyline 360 template. Ethical documentation covers ASI protocols, participant consent for sacred viewing, and data minimization for sensitive responses. For DH practitioners, this demonstrates "small data, rich workflow" reproducibility: modest temple case yields generalizable methods for evaluating immersive heritage.