Virtual Reconstructions: Documentation as an Expression of Good Academic Practice

Virtual architectural reconstructions have been developed for nearly four decades now, with the London Charter providing a framework for their scholarly use, particularly emphasising the need for transparent and evaluable documentation. Despite this, documentation remains uncommon due to the absence of binding standards, limited incentives, and the considerable effort required. Crucially, experience shows that documentation cannot realistically be produced retrospectively and must be created alongside with the reconstruction process. To address this gap, IDOVIR, a platform supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), aims to streamline documentation workflows and improve communication among researchers by providing an efficient, web-based framework for recording and sharing information. More than ten years of experience with such approaches have both refined existing methods and highlighted the need for broader standardisation. The community is increasingly seeking to define general principles, criteria, and best practices for high-quality documentation beyond project-specific solutions. This paper contributes to that effort by outlining key requirements, proposing structural guidelines, and compiling relevant source types for reconstructions, with the goal of fostering consensus and improving the transparency, understanding, and evaluation of virtual reconstruction projects. With our proposal, we want to intensify the necessary communication process in the community to establish coordinated standardisation, which is lacking at the moment.