I haven’t talked much about on here about the pandemic. A year ago today, the #DHgoesViral twitter conference happened, swiftly organised by Agiati Benardou at the outbreak of Covid-19 across Europe. By then we were a few weeks into a rapid change in how we were all living, and locked down at home with minimal contact with the outside world. Only a few weeks before – and the day before the UK lockdown started – I remember talking to a senior administrator, who was convinced universities wouldn’t close. We were closed down 24 hours later. Everything was stress and uncertainty and a huge cognitive load to deal with.
DH in the time of Virus played out entirely over twitter. It saw Digital Humanities experts, both academics and practitioners, as well as Digital Research Infrastructures and Initiatives from across Europe, give their thoughts on what was happening to our field and our professional areas at the time of the sudden lockdowns. I was asked to give mine, and honestly, finding the mental ability to concentrate on preparing these 10 tweets was hard, it took me nearly a day (when in normal life I could bash this out in 10 mins or so, although what is normal anymore….?). I thought I would park them here, to think about what has changed – and what is the same – at the end of our second lockdown in the UK, and as central Europe goes into its third.
You can see the starting point for the other #DHgoesViral twitter stream “talks” on this blog. Here was mine. I can see now we’re not so panicked, but still restricted. We’re still depending on infrastructures that are under resourced. There are still loads of people doing a tonne of work behind the scenes. And we’re dependent on digital given the libraries and archives are (at the moment) still closed…
Look after yourselves, everyone.
Melissa Terras 