First meeting of this group took place in Hybrid fashion, present: DW, AR, TB, AB, JW, SZL, GG, CT

• Putnam's 2016 AHR piece on 'The Text-searchable and the transnational'
• A provocation mainly to historians to be conscious of the digital transformation of their research practice.
• Tim Hitchcock's pieces in the footnotes even more provocative

Discussed:

• Differing ideas of search and discovery
• Problems of obscure search vs. critical search (see Jo Guldi in JCA)
• Putnam focuses on textual collections/materials: do museum collections face the same challenges?
• Generous interfaces and more fuzzy forms of discovery, including ML approaches that take a broader lens to corpora etc.
• How to make explicit the assumptions, methods, caveats, flaws and shortcomings of digital tools.
• Reducing friction vs. reducing (local) expertise
• How do the problems of transnational research (in a digital world) offer a guide to the challenges of working across collections à la Congruence Engine

Agreed to:

• Open up the group invite to the whole project
• Aim to schedule a monthly meeting
• Explore a more 'positive' or 'generative' piece to read next, maybe from the inaugural JDH
• Possibility of ad hoc or more frequent meetings on particular problems or topics
• Possible papers on specific tools relating e.g., to the pilot (Omeka).