[MEI-L] 2nd CfP: Music Encoding Conference 2022, Dalhousie University (Hybrid), 19-22 May 2022

[David M. Weigl]

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

** ABSTRACT DEADLINE: December 10th, PAPER DEADLINE: December 17th, 2021 **

This is the second 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 music encoding and description
    * (symbolic) music information retrieval using music encoding
    * evaluation of music encodings
    * 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), using APA-style citations and references,
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 workshop’s objective 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 (Timezone: AoE / Anywhere on Earth)
---------------------------------------------------

10 December: Initial registration via our ConfTool website: www.conftool.net/music-encoding2022 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
Estelle Joubert, Dalhousie University
Anna Kijas, Lilly Music Library, Tufts University
David Lewis, University of Oxford | Goldsmiths University of London
Sageev 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