This project is a collaboration between four researchers who live and work in three cities – Göteborg, London and Umeå. Our plan was to meet once a year for a week in Umeå to discuss research, watch films, design data collection and do analysis together and generally to think and learn collectively. In September 2019, we had our first Geek Week. This year, Covid-19 meant we had to create something that could work online. Here we look briefly at what we did.
Last week, for our first virtual Geek Week, we met online between one and four times every day. In between the meetings, we read four journal articles and a chapter from a PhD, watched extracts from two films, and looked through lots of interview data. These activities enabled us to stay focused on the project for most of the week without having to endure non-stop zoom meetings, gave us a sense of collective endeavour across our different locations and time zones, and supplied things for us to talk about in our online meetings.
Although none of us felt it matched up to the experience of being in the same physical space that we had shared last year, we were surprised by how generative it was. By Thursday afternoon, we were collaborating on a google doc in real time, capturing some of the ideas, themes and questions that we had come up with through our discussions. Being compelled to work online, which initially felt so limiting, has expanded our sense of what it is possible to do virtually, which will help us as the project develops. For, even in a pre-Covid world, we were rarely all in the same place at the same time.
We are not sure that a week like this would always work so well. Probably, that we have all met before and that we share values, ways of working and theoretical perspectives helped. We’d be interested to hear about other people’s experiences of moving research collaborations online.