Dear colleagues,

We invite you to join the DARIAH Virtual Exchange Session: The Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings on Thursday, May 28 2020 at 14:00-16:00 UTC+1.

In light of the recent postponement of the DARIAH Annual Event 2020 (https://dariah-ae-2020.sciencesconf.org/) but also of the disruption of all physical scholarly meetings due to the COVID 19 pandemic, we are proposing to hold a virtual exchange session to reflect on the “Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings”. On May 21, we will be launching an online exhibition of resources and ideas exploring the many primitives of and issues surrounding scholarly meetings which will remain open until 28 May 2020. The exhibition will act as a pool of prompts and provocations for thought and conversation, a dialogue that will culminate in a 2-hour synchronous virtual exchange session on the 28th (from 14:00-16:00 UTC+1).

Through this unique event, we hope to explore together the many functions scholarly meetings fulfill in our lives, including the respective potentials of the online and offline spaces at our disposal. We will look at what we value most enduringly and what we might no longer require within our current and emerging practices of personal, informal or semiformal exchange, creating for 2020 a highly relevant response to the project which John Unsworth took on 20 years ago to better understand scholarship through the lens of the primitives.