Context

This demo introduces MANO - Manuscripts Online, a pedagogically oriented platform designed for teaching and learning in digital manuscript studies.[1]

Developed as a fully open, browser-based, and serverless environment, MANO enables students, educators, and cultural heritage practitioners to create, share, and explore TEI-based metadata, transcriptions, and learning materials without installation, authentication, or dependence on institutional infrastructure. It does not host a fixed corpus; instead, it provides an environment where users can create and edit their own TEI-based materials, with current support for metadata creation and sharing.

MANO operates as a low-threshold entry point into digital manuscript scholarship by emphasising hands-on TEI XML work with immediately visible results, an approach shown to support effective TEI learning (Faghihi et al., 2022).

Approach

MANO is designed around four interrelated principles—accessibility, collaboration, sustainability, and user-centred design—which shape usability and user experience (UX) decisions to support learner engagement.

Accessibility is operationalised through interface and workflow choices that minimise technical prerequisites and foreground open scholarly standards, enabling users to interact directly with TEI-based metadata and transcriptions. This principle is embodied in core components such as the Metadata Editor and Transcription Viewer, whose interfaces, sample-loading functions, and XML previews make underlying data structures intelligible to beginners while preserving methodological transparency.

Collaboration is supported through shared spaces for learning and exploration, via the Resources and Metadata Collection sections, which enable instructors and learners to consult and reuse community-contributed materials and records.

Sustainability is pursued through a lightweight architecture based on GitHub repositories, avoiding servers and ensuring long-term maintainability with low maintenance requirements.[2]

Across all components, MANO implements user-centred design practices grounded in research on usability in digital humanities (DH) tool development. Initial feedback from students using the platform in a seminar setting informed iterative design improvements. These include consistent terminology, real examples, error prevention, clear status notifications, technical and procedural documentation, and the use of familiar graphical conventions (Bulatovic et al., 2016; Gibbs and Owens, 2012).

This approach builds on established usability heuristics (Nielsen, 1994) and on critical analyses of DH infrastructures, which demonstrate that despite increased attention to user-centred methods, many DH applications remain difficult to use or insufficiently self-explanatory (Thoden et al., 2017). These principles position MANO as an environment that reduces cognitive barriers and facilitates engagement in digital manuscript studies.

Contribution

The demo presents MANO through concrete examples based on user-generated TEI data. It shows how its different interface components support learning, collaboration, and confidence-building, and how UX choices influence interaction with digital tools.

Through selected use cases, the demo illustrates how manuscript descriptions and transcriptions move from structured TEI XML to readable, shareable online representations, making visible the often opaque transition from encoding to interpretation.

MANO is presented not as a substitute for professional research infrastructures, but as a complementary environment that supports entry and participation in digital manuscript studies.

[1] MANO is accessible at: https://mano-project.github.io/.

[2] The MANO project repositories are available via the project’s GitHub organisation: https://github.com/orgs/mano-project/repositories.