[MEI-L] CfP: Music Encoding Conference 2022, Dalhouse University (Hybrid), 19-22 May 2022

[David Weigl]

[With apologies for cross-posting. Please distribute widely!]


We are pleased to announce our call for papers, posters, panels, and
workshops for the Music Encoding Conference 2022. 

The Music Encoding Conference is the annual meeting of the Music
Encoding Initiative (MEI) community and all who are interested in the
digital representation of music. This cross-disciplinary venue is open
to and brings together members from various encoding, analysis, and
music research communities, including musicologists, theorists,
librarians, technologists, music scholars, teachers, and students, and
provides an opportunity for learning and engaging with and from each
other.

The MEC 2022 will take place Thursday 19th – Sunday 22nd May, 2022, at
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada. While we sincerely hope to
welcome as many attendees in person as possible, this year’s Conference
will again run in hybrid mode, allowing remote attendance where travel
plans are affected by the ongoing pandemic.

Please note that submission types and guidelines have been adapted this
year in response to community feedback. 

Background
----------------
Music encoding is a critical component for fields and areas of study
including computational or digital musicology, digital editions,
symbolic music information retrieval, digital libraries, digital
pedagogy, or the wider music industry. 

The Music Encoding Conference has emerged as the foremost international
forum where researchers and practitioners from across these varied
fields can meet and explore new developments in music encoding and its
use. The Conference celebrates a multidisciplinary program, combining
the latest advances from established music encodings, novel technical
proposals and encoding extensions, and the presentation or evaluation of
new practical applications of music encoding (e.g. in academic study,
libraries, editions, pedagogy).

Pre-conference workshops provide an opportunity to quickly engage with
best practice in the community. Newcomers are encouraged to submit to
the main program with articulations of the potential for music encoding
in their work, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of existing
approaches within this context.

Following the formal program, an unconference session fosters
collaboration in the community through the meeting of Interest Groups,
and self-selected discussions on hot topics that emerge during the
conference. For these meetings, there are various spaces generously
provided by the hosting institution on May 22nd. Please be in touch with
conference organizers if you need to reserve these spaces. For meetings
on other days during or immediately after the conference, availability
can be checked upon request.

The program welcomes contributions from all those working on, or with,
any music encoding. In addition, the Conference serves as a focus event
for the Music Encoding Initiative community, with its annual community
meeting scheduled the day following the main program. We in particular
seek to broaden the scope of musical repertories considered, and to
provide a welcoming, inclusive community for all who are interested in
this work.

Topics
---------

The conference welcomes contributions from all those who are developing
or applying music encodings in their work and research. Topics include,
but are not limited to:

    * data structures for music encoding
    * music encoding standardisation
    * music encoding interoperability / universality
    * methodologies for encoding, music editing, description and
analysis
    * computational analysis of encoded music
    * rendering of symbolic music data in audio and graphical forms
    * conceptual encoding of relationships between multimodal music
forms (e.g. symbolic music data, encoded text, facsimile images, audio)
    * capture, interchange, and re-purposing of musical data and
metadata
    * ontologies, authority files, and linked data in musi
c encoding and
description
    * (symbolic) music informatio    * best practice in approaches to music encoding

and the use or application of music encodings in:

    * music theory and analysis
    * digital musicology and, more broadly, digital humanities
    * digital editions
    * music digital libraries
    * bibliographies and bibliographic studies
    * catalogues and collection management
    * composition
    * performance
    * teaching and learning
    * search and browsing
    * multimedia music presentation, exploration, and exhibition
    * machine learning approaches

Submissions
-----------------

In response to feedback received from the community on last year’s
submission process, this year’s MEC will be accepting submissions in the
following forms for presentation in the main conference programme (page
counts include figures and tables, but exclude references):

* Paper submissions of between 4 and 10 pages,
* Poster submissions of up to 4 pages.

MEC ‘22 also welcomes submissions of proposals for panel sessions and
workshops. Submissions to each category will be reviewed according to
specific expectations outlined in “Submission Guidelines” below.
Finally, we will welcome submissions of late-breaking reports of up to 2
pages during a later submission period closer to the conference dates
(see “Important Dates” below). 

Authors of paper submissions will be invited to present their work in a
plenary setting if accepted. Authors of poster submissions will be given
the opportunity to briefly present in a plenary setting (“lightning
talk”) in addition to a poster session if accepted. Authors of
late-breaking reports will be invited to present during a dedicated
poster session outside of the main conference programme. 

All submissions to the main conference programme (papers, posters, and
panel sessions) will undergo blind review by multiple members of the
program committee before acceptance. Late-breaking reports will be
lightly reviewed for relevance to the conference (see “Topics” above)
and accepted in limited numbers based on the order in which submissions
are received. Authors of workshop submissions will be contacted by the
PC to coordinate workshop planning in consultation with the local
organizers and contributors.

Please note the deadlines for the submission process outlined under
“Important Dates” below.

Submission Guidelines
------------------------------

All submissions should be formatted in A4 size with 2.5cm margins, font
size 12, single space, justified, in a sans-serif typeface (e.g.
Calibri) according to this template:
https://tinyurl.com/mec2022-submission-template. Please take care to
remove all identifying information from the submitted PDF before the
upload - submissions should be anonymised for blind review.

Submission types (page counts include figures and tables, but exclude
references):

* Paper submissions (4–10 pages) are expected to present overviews or
detail specific aspects of ongoing or completed projects, present
detailed case-studies or elaborated perspectives on best practices in
the field, or provide other reports on topics relevant to the conference
(see “Topics” above). The length requirement for submissions is
intentionally broad this year, to allow authors flexibility in their
reporting. Note that reporting is expected to be complete and
self-contained in its argumentation. 

* Poster submissions (up to 4 pages) are expected to report on
early-stage work, or to present experimental ideas for community
feedback. 

The following types are welcome to be abstract submissions:

* Panel discussions (3–5 pages). Submissions should describe the topic
and nature of the discussion, along with the main theses and objectives
of the proposed contributions; panel discussions are not expected to be
a set of papers which could otherwise be submitted as individual
papers).

* Half- or full-day pre-conference workshops (up to 3 pages). Proposals
should 
include possible conveners, a description of the workshopobjective and proposed duration, as well as its logistical and technical
requirements).

* Late-breaking reports (up to 2 pages). 

The PC will coordinate the duration of proposed panels and workshops in
consultation with the local organizers and contributors.

Important Dates
----------------------

10 December: Initial registration via our ConfTool website:
www.conftool.net/music-encoding2022 (available from late October 2021)
with metadata of contributors including name(s) of author(s),
affiliation(s) and email address(es), type and title of the submission,
and a short one-paragraph abstract.

17 December: Upload of anonymized submissions (see submission guidelines
above) for review to ConfTool. Please be aware that ConfTool only
accepts PDF submissions. Please remove all identifying information from
the submitted PDF before the upload.

11 February: Notification of acceptance and invitation to authors of
accepted submissions to contribute to the MEC proceedings. A formatted
template pre-configured with your metadata will be provided on or about
the day after notification.

13 March: Presenter registration deadline (papers, posters, workshops,
panels). At least one author per accepted submission must register and
confirm in-person or online participation. 

3 April: Upload of accepted submissions in conference-ready version
using the provided template. This version will be made available to
registered conference attendees prior to the conference. 

3 April–19 April: Submissions of late-breaking reports. A limited number
of submissions will be accepted in order received. Further details to be
announced.

19–22 May: Conference.

5 June: Final upload of camera-ready papers for publication in the
proceedings. Camera-ready versions are welcome to incorporate light
modifications in response to feedback obtained during the conference.
The MEC proceedings will be published under an open access license and
with an individual DOI number for all papers.

We especially encourage students and other first time attendees to make
a submission to the Music Encoding Conference. We have applied for
funding to provide a number of $800 (CAD) travel bursaries to support
national and international travel for student presenters, and are
seeking further ways to support their attendance. Further details will
be announced on the conference web page in due course.

Additional information
-----------------------------
While we look forward to welcoming as many of you as possible in person
at Dalhousie University, we are preparing for MEC ‘22 within the context
of ongoing uncertainty due to the Covid-19 pandemic. To allow the
community to best accommodate to this situation, we are organising this
year’s conference with the following commitments in mind:

 
* The conference will allow remote participation as in the previous
years (MEC ‘20 and ‘21). Decisions on the precise implementation of this
year’s hybrid format will be announced in due course and communicated
widely (conference web page, mailing list, MEI Slack, Twitter) in the
months leading up to the event.

* We commit to the announced dates for MEC ‘22 (19th-22nd May). There
will be no rescheduling of the conference to fit projected changes in
the pandemic situation this year.

Additional details regarding registration, accommodation, etc. will be
announced on the conference web page
(https://music-encoding.org/conference/2022/).

In case of questions, feel free to contact: conference2022 at
music-encoding.org.

Programme Committee
-------------------------------
Daniel Bangert, Digital Repository of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy
Benjamin Bohl, Department of Musicology, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Susanne Cox, Beethoven-Haus Bonn
Timothy Duguid, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow
Norbert Dubowy, Digital Mozart Edition, Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation
Maristella Feustle,  University of North Texas Libraries Music Library
Est
elle Joubert, Dalhousie University
Anna Kijas, Lilly Music Library, Tufts University
David Lewis, University of Oxford | GoldsmSageev Oore, Dalhousie University | Vector Institute for Artificial
Intelligence
Anna Plaksin, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz | Birmingham City
University
Juliette Regimbal, McGill University
Kristina Richts-Matthaei, Paderborn University
David M. Weigl (Committee Chair), University of Music and Performing
Arts Vienna

Local Organizing Committee
--------------------------------------
Jennifer Bain (Committee Chair), Dalhousie University
Estelle Joubert, Dalhousie University
Sageev Oore, Dalhousie University | Vector Institute for Artificial
Intelligence
Morgan Paul, Dalhousie University