Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings: A DH-Inspired Exploration of the Virtual Incunabular in the Time of COVID 19

This article documents the theoretical and practical considerations underpinning the COVID-19-inspired digital humanities event: “The Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings.” Drawing from both the long tradition of work on scholarly primitives as well as the rush of new work that appeared in the early months of 2020, the event described here was designed as both an exercise in critical making and a response to the constraints of the virtual incunabular state so many organisations found themselves in, attempting to recreate their planned face-to-face meetings in virtual formats without due consideration of the affordances and constraints of each context. As a structurally distributed organisation, the DARIAH European Research Infrastructure as event host was able to bring its experience of virtual interaction to the recosideration of these challenges, but also the sensitivity to research processes and practices that is central to our positioning in the digital humanities. As such, the resulting model for a virtual event, realised in May 2020 and described in this paper, was built upon a very self-conscious set of considerations, meta-reflection, and goals regarding what we might tacitly and could expect from a virtual event. The instruments designed to deliver this, as well as their performance in practice, is documented alongside consideration of what lessons the experience delivers about both virtual meetings and more generally about the interactions of scholarly communities.