Over the last couple of years, many of us have had to radically reshape our ideas of how collaboration, community engagement, research groups or labs might look and function when people cannot physically come together, or when it is only rarely possible. Many of the tools, methods, and approaches already used in Digital Humanities were already designed to enable collaboration and connection at a distance, of course, but for many of us these were only part of a workflow that also included important face-to-face elements. In particular, engaged research with non-academic stakeholders, pre-COVID projects in my lab, usually built on months or years of face-to-face conversations, meetings, workshops, visits, before we got to the stage of feeling we had sufficient shared goals and understandings of each other’s context to work successfully in digitally-mediated forms. In the last two years our lab, Intergener8, has had to reimagine itself as a wholly digital, entirely remote and distributed entity. There are types of projects and stages of research for which this poses no difficulty, and in fact which are the kinds of work that a lab or research group conceptualised from the start as virtual would have been naturally drawn to. This includes, for example, our work on text analysis, analysis of software, experiments with AI, serious games, visualisation of data from existing, near-complete projects, etc. However, our lab was primarily intended as the digital, somewhat experimental, arm of a research centre focusing on collaborative research with community members and non-academic partner organisations. In this talk, I will therefore survey the various stages and elements of such projects that we found were not so easily adaptable to our new, fully digital, fully remote context. I will talk about various approaches we have tried over the past two years, what has worked, what hasn’t, and what we will take with us even if we do return to more face-to-face collaborative research in the future.

1. digital collaboration
2. digital humanities
3. research
4. research collaboration

This talk was delivered virtually on June 10, 2022, as an Institute Lecture as part of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada). The session was chaired by Graham Jensen (University of Victoria).