Daejeon, July 27–31
Digital manuscript studies increasingly rely on sophisticated infrastructures—TEI-XML editors, database-driven repositories, collaborative environments, and visualisation platforms—that require stable servers, maintenance, and institutional support. While such systems enable advanced workflows, they create barriers for students, early-career scholars, and small projects lacking technical or financial resources. This is particularly evident in teaching contexts, where instructors need simple tools to introduce manuscript studies, TEI-XML encoding and editing. Students often struggle to understand how encoded documents can be visualised, transformed, or reused in practice (Dee 2014). Existing TEI-learning initiatives (Terras et al. 2020) and earlier applications for generating TEI P5 descriptions (Vertan and Reimers 2012) demonstrate attempts to simplify training, yet typically require installation or are not designed for classroom contexts. Effective TEI teaching usually necessitates small-scale, project-specific training (Faghihi et al. 2022), which is seldom feasible within the confines of coursework. Widely used environments such as Transkribus, eScriptorium, Oxygen XML Editor, Leaf-Writer offer powerful functionalities, yet they generally depend on server infrastructures, API keys, licences, or configuration that exceed the needs of introductory teaching. Transkribus: https://www.transkribus.org/; eScriptorium: https://escriptorium.rich.ru.nl/; Oxygen XML Editor: https://www.oxygenxml.com/; Leaf-Writer: https://leaf-writer.leaf-vre.org/.
In response, this paper presents MANO – Manuscripts Online, a fully browser-based platform designed as a pedagogical environment for learning TEI and working with manuscript materials. The platform’s design is informed by recurring challenges observed in TEI teaching, particularly the difficulty of linking encoding to visual output. MANO offers a lightweight infrastructure for manuscript description, transcription visualisation, and knowledge exchange. Its serverless design, hosted on GitHub and requiring no installation or login, ensures accessibility, sustainability, and low-threshold engagement.
MANO is implemented as a multi-repository ecosystem hosted on GitHub, which provides both the delivery mechanism for the web application and the storage layer for user-contributed content, enabling fully browser-based operation. The workflows draw inspiration from the collaborative model of HTR-United, a catalogue of training datasets for handwritten text recognition: https://htr-united.github.io/. MANO consists of three repositories: mano-project (web application), mano-resources (teaching materials), and mano-metadata (manuscript descriptions): https://github.com/mano-project/mano-project.github.io; https://github.com/mano-project/mano-resources; https://github.com/mano-project/mano-metadata.
Resources offers openly accessible learning materials contributed by instructors. As the platform is recent, contributions are currently limited but expected to grow. The repository includes documentation for non-technical users; uploaded materials are shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Transcription Viewer enables the upload and exploration of TEI-XML transcriptions directly in the browser, where the XML is parsed and transformed into a simplified HTML representation. When facsimile links are present, the viewer synchronises the transcription with the corresponding images, while an embedded editor supports live XML editing with an immediately updating preview. The embedded XML editor is implemented with the CodeMirror JavaScript library: https://codemirror.net/.
Metadata Editor is a form-based environment for producing structured metadata according to the TEI Manuscript Description module. TEI Manuscript Description Guidelines: https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html. JavaScript validation ruleset: https://github.com/mano-project/mano-project.github.io/blob/main/JS/validation.js.
Metadata Collection serves as a shared pedagogical corpus, aggregating user-contributed records stored in a dedicated GitHub repository, supporting comparison, reuse, and collaborative learning across cohorts. Records are fetched client-side at runtime via the GitHub API and displayed in an interface that supports search, filtering, and a geographic visualisation of manuscript origins and storage locations. The geographic visualisation is implemented using the Leaflet JavaScript library: https://leafletjs.com/.
MANO offers a model of technical engagement grounded in openness, portability, and sustainability. By integrating TEI-compliant metadata creation, TEI-XML visualisation, and collaborative contribution into a fully client-side platform, it provides an alternative to database-backed or server-dependent editorial environments.
In line with the DH2026 theme of Engagement, this architecture minimises infrastructural and pedagogical barriers—eliminating requirements such as installation, authentication, or institutional hosting—while its simple, user-friendly interface supports learners encountering TEI for the first time. Its browser-based design contributes to ongoing discussions of sustainable DH infrastructures and the value of flexible, decentralised tools (van Zundert 2012). By adopting a minimal, modular ecosystem to counteract technological obsolescence in DH tools (Zenzaro 2024), MANO demonstrates how simple, maintainable, low-overhead architectures can support inclusive future DH teaching tools.