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New research practices in the humanities increasingly integrate digital tools and virtual research environments (VREs). To support and study these changes, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has recently started an initiative called Alfalab as a joint project of five KNAW research institutes. Alfalab is part of the KNAW’s strategy of supporting humanities research in general and digital and computational humanities in particular. As a VRE, Alfalab includes a virtual laboratory that combines a tools registry and a dataset registry in two areas of digital humanities—text analysis and the application of Geographical Information Systems to historical materials. Alfalab addresses the problem of sustainability and/or applicability of tools tailored to heterogeneous data, and it takes the particular conditions of the humanities as a starting point. Furthermore, Alfalab examines success and failure factors in the digital humanities, and it includes—at the earliest phase of tool development— an interactive approach to user feedback. Alfalab therefore embraces the issue of heterogeneity of research questions and methods, and seeks to be responsive to this in its structure and way of working. In the framework of Alfalab, researchers and users across research institutes and universities, and across a number of disciplines come together to develop tools and to enhance research practices. To achieve that, they continually transcend traditional disciplinary and research boundaries, and, in such a processes, they often face the unexpected—directions, effects, problems, solutions, failures, benefits, communicative breakdowns, and so on. Our proposed contribution will highlight these aspects of Alfalab. It will trace, record, and exhibit benefits and challenges emerging from encounters with the unexpected in a collaborative scholarly work on developing a humanities lab. This presentation will offer a set of short interviews with the Alfalab developers, users, and funders, as well as with the digital humanities experts outside the Alfalab project. This array of interviews will provide a multisided perspective on potentials and complexities stemming from the development and implementation of the next generation digital tools for the humanities research. The presentation will also include recordings from the Alfalab test sessions, portraying specificities of the humanities scholars’ interaction with the Alfalab demonstrator tools. Finally, the video will show Alfalab research and development team sessions, illustrating dilemmas, problems, problem-solving strategies and other elements of the Alfalab development process.

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