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The Africa Multiple Interactive Research Atlas (AMIRA) is the research-data platform of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. It is built and maintained by the Cluster's Digital Research Environment (DRE), its digital infrastructure unit. We design, build, and maintain the data systems that connect researchers across the Africa Multiple Research Centres (AMRCs) and partner institutions worldwide. Our work spans research data management, knowledge graph development, AI-assisted data processing, and digital literacy — all grounded in the FAIR and CARE principles and a commitment to multiple knowledge systems.
Two principles guide how we work. Curation and description are a joint effort with partners at the AMRCs in Ouagadougou, Rhodes, Lagos, and Moi: each centre describes the data it knows best, and the DRE runs the shared infrastructure that connects them. Storage stays distributed by default: data remains in its local repository, while Bayreuth holds the metadata layer that points to it. Research data becomes findable without being relocated.
The AMRCs and partner institutions hold substantial research collections and datasets. The DRE team works with each centre to assess the scope, nature, quality, and size of this data, and to determine what can be linked to the platform. High-quality metadata makes researchers' data more discoverable, and their work more visible to a wider community of peers. All this metadata comes together here in AMIRA, an Omeka S site that makes the collections of the AMRCs and their partners searchable from one place.
From a single search bar, you can move across research items, the Cluster's publications and podcasts, projects, the people and organisations behind them, and the places, languages, and subjects that connect them, each corpus with its own filters for narrowing a search. Every record opens onto the people, projects, and themes around it, and interactive maps, timelines, and network graphs make the metadata easy to read at a glance. AMIRA is open to all, and no account is needed to explore it.
AMIRA focuses on the Cluster's research data. For news, events, and general information about the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, visit the main website at africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de.