The OMnibus is an online archive of multimedia material on mantras and a core output of the interdisciplinary and transnational research project MANTRAMS - Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia (ERC Synergy Grant ID 101118934, project runtime 2024-2030). MANTRAMS is a pioneering, large-scale research project entirely dedicated to mantras, past and present; jointly hosted by the University of Oxford, the University of Vienna, and the University of Tübingen. It will investigate the sacred utterances, formulas, and powerful syllables originating in the religious traditions of early India and then spread via practitioners, texts, rituals, and iconography, examining the roots of mantra in the religions of the Indian subcontinent, their circulation across South and Southeast Asia, and their transcultural significance in global spiritualities today.
With the OMnibus, we present a curated subset of the material and data collected, produced, and collated under the MANTRAMS umbrella. We strive to create narrative pathways through the data as well as sophisticated search functions for academic research. Conceptualizing the OMnibus multilingually and mobile-first for a globally disperse audience as well as providing spaces for artistic intervention and immersive elements are core design principles guiding the development processes.
We acknowledge our intellectual debt and our gratitude to the gurus, the mantra specialists, the practitioners, and the meditators who have transmitted this knowledge, dynamically, across the centuries, and beyond South Asia. Without them, there would be no MANTRAMS research project. We furthermore recognize the longstanding work of countless Open Source development communities. The OMnibus humbly stands on their giant shoulders.
The OMnibus is developed collaboratively by MANTRAMS and the Digital Humanities Center (DHC) at the University of Tübingen. While this codebase is operated by a small technical staff, the overall design, concept, and data curation are shouldered to varying degrees by the entire MANTRAMS team. Additionally, as per the project's ethical commitment to social and epistemic justice, researchers take great care to involve communities of mantra practitioners in the representation of their practices and data.
For general questions and feedback, please reach out to Edda Sofie Schwarzkopf, the MANTRAMS Digital Humanities and Data Management Officer (edda.schwarzkopf@uni-tuebingen.de).
For questions and concerns about Data Protection, please reach out to Geraldine Quénéhervé, the MANTRAMS Data Protection Officer (data@mantrams.eu).
To achieve a first tangible OMnibus Demo in the early stages of the project while already striving towards a possible static implementation in the long run, this code is based on CollectionBuilder-CSV: https://collectionbuilder.github.io/.
CollectionBuilder is a project of University of Idaho Library's Digital Initiatives and the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) following the Lib-Static methodology. Powered by the open source static site generator Jekyll and a modern static web stack, it puts collection metadata to work building beautiful sites.
The basic theme is created using Bootstrap. Metadata visualizations are built using open source libraries such as DataTables, Leafletjs, Spotlight gallery, lazysizes, and Lunr.js. Object metadata is exposed using Schema.org and Open Graph protocol standards.
Questions can be directed to collectionbuilder.team@gmail.com
OMnibus documentation and general web content is licensed Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (CC0). CollectionBuilder documentation and general web content is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
This license does NOT include any objects or images used in digital collections, which may have individually applied licenses described by a "rights" field.
OMnibus code is licensed MIT; CollectionBuilder code is licensed MIT.
This license does not include external dependencies included in the assets/lib directory, which are covered by their individual licenses.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
