During the course of the March and April, the GULAGECHOES team held two intensive off-site work sessions to code the interviews that the project had been able to complete since fieldwork began in earnest in the later autumn 2019. To date, and despite COVID-19 travel restrictions team members and sub-contracted researchers have been able to take over 100 interviews with former prisoners in Russia, Estonia, Georgia and Romania. This just under one half of all the interviews planned for the project, and which we hope to continue as COVID-19 restrictions begin to lift allowing the ‘home team’ to get into the field. The purpose of the two three-day workshops was to begin the process of coding the interviews taken in Russia. In earlier workshops we had all got to grips with Atlas.ti and had had refined the code groups and codes that a preliminary reading of interviews suggested would be productive answering the main research questions of the project, as well as suggesting new categories. Taking the work off-site focused attention at the task at hand and helped us to achieve what we set out to do, and more.
