DH Goes Viral

As a response to COVID-19 and while the onset of the pandemic was still in its very early stages, in April 2020 the Digital Curation Unit (DCU), Research and Innovation Center “Athena”, as co-ordinator of APOLLONIS, the Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation, organized a Twitter Conference under the title “DH in the Time of Virus”. This event aimed at battling academic isolation and facilitating and supporting community building and osmosis in DH research and education. Due to its sensitive timing, with Italy going through extreme difficulties and Europe and the US entering quarantine and work-from-home regimes, the Twitter Conference provided a platform of communication of DH research pursuits as well as of expression of an unprecedented human experience. With the support of a DARIAH Theme grant, a year later, in 2021, we designed and organized a digital workshop in which we reunited the Twitter Conference participants alongside further DH researchers who were selected through an open call.

The outcome of these events is an electronic as well as a printed publication monitoring the effects of the pandemic on e-Education, e-Research and digital tools, methods and platforms, the developments the pandemic has expedited and the delays it may have caused in DH research and the distance covered and toils endured by DH researchers and practitioners to keep track of their work.