23rd CHIME Meeting in Prague
September 2021 on ‘Chinese Music and Memory’
Meeting will be held online, divided over two periods
(1-3 Sept, and 8-10 Sept 2021)
To all partipant speakers and others interested in joining our event,
We were so very hopeful to meet up with everyone, with all of you in person in September in Prague... Unfortunately, continuing travel restrictions and health risks related to the pandemic have forced us to do things differently: we can only make this 23rd edition of CHIME happen as an on-line event. Hopefully, this will be a once-in-a-lifetime exception in our series of annual encounters on Chinese music!
However, together with our hosts, the Instute of East Asian Studies at Charles University, we are making every effort to preserve, as much as we can, the usual intimacy and relaxed ’family’ feeling of our CHIME meetings.
Below you can read how we hope to achieve this.
You will also find more information on the website that has been set up, so very professionally, by Lenka Chaloupkova and our other colleagues in Prague:
23rd CHIME meeting Prague – Chinese Music and Memory (chime-prague.com).
Please make sure to register at this site, and please do so by 7 August at the latest, so that we can finalize our programme schedule.
On this site, chime-prague.com, you will find a preliminary list of speakers and topics. As you will see, we look forward to a fantastic line-up of speakers and topics. However, if you are not going to join us for this edition, if your paper features in our list, but you would like it to be deleted, or if you have any changes in the title of your presentation, please inform us directly and as soon as possible via email (Frank Kouwenhoven at Chime@wxs.nl)
We know from experience that on-line meetings make considerable demands on people’s concentration. Especially so if the participants are located in different time-zones. Meeting online with a big group, in continuous paper sessions, also seems to inhibit more informal contacts between speakers, for example during tea-breaks. But we plan to do something about it!
Here’s how we would like to proceed:
1) We wish to ‘speed up’ sessions by making the talks shorter (15 minutes per speaker), and by spreading the talks. We expect to schedule rounds of three speakers per hour, with 15 minutes for every individual presentation, followed by a joint round of questions and discussion. Please take the shorter time into account when you prepare your paper.
2) We will shorten the daily sessions to afternoon periods from 15:00 h to 19:00 h, European time. This will include two 30-minute breaks, to give us ample time to relax in-between speakers’ presentations. So... no full-day-long sessions, but a more ‘gentle’ schedule.
3) To make the burden still ligher we will divide the conference into two periods of 3 afternoons each: the first installment will take place from Wednesday 1 September to Friday 3 September, the second installment from Wednesday 8 to Friday 10 September. On those days, we will only meet from 15:00 to 19:00 h.
4) Consider to pre-record your spoken presentation and send us a clip!
Well, you don’t have to, but you can! We are happy to store it on our website, so that people can also visit your talk earlier or later, at a time of their own chosing. This would further decrease the burden of watching long sessions on-line. It will also be convenient for anyone who happens to be scheduled in one of our (very few) parallel sessions. No one will have to miss your presentation!
The discussions, following the papers, will remain ‘live’ of course.
You can send your clip to the following email: vit.chaloupka@gmail.com until 20 August. (We will need some time to load up your materials.)
Of course we realize that not everyone will manage to send us a pre-recorded talk. No worries: we will naturally retain our normal programme schedule, and talks can obviously be given ‘live’ during the time-slots indicated. We hope to have a full programme schedule available on-line by the 10th of August. We will keep you informed about this.
5) You can submit a longer text document of your paper for our website if you like.
If you feel that 15 minutes is too short to tell the entire story, this is an additional option to provide fellow-participants with more data and background to your paper. It’s not obligatory, of course, but we will make any texts that people submit available on the site. Note that they can only be viewed by our formally registered participants, and – being drafts – they must not be quoted by anyone without formal written permission from the author(s).
Fully edited papers can be submitted for the CHIME Journal in due course (formal deadline: 15 February 2022). Our next issue of the CHIME Journal (no.22) will be out in the Autumn of 2022.
6) Chat with colleagues informally during our tea-breaks!
We won’t have any concerts in this meeting, since on-line musicking simply doesn’t feel as good as genuine live performances! Of course, if anyone feels like submitting a short performance clip to us, for the other participants’ perusal, we will be happy to post it.
And then there’s another thing: coffee & tea breaks...
Normally at a conference we would walk around with our cups and chat informally with colleagues. Can we do this in the upcoming online conference? Yes, we can! There is an on-line service called ‘wonder me’ which will enable us to create and facilitate informal contact during tea breaks. On the platform (directly linked to our conference site), you will find Chimers, their photos displayed in circles, small our big circles, which you can join or leave (or ignore) at your own convenience, simply by clicking. Circles can consist of one, two, three or more people. You can even start your own ‘circle’, and chat informally with whoever (among the participants) wishes to join you. In this way, we also hope to retain a little bit of informality, in spite of the physical distances separating us!
6) Please send us a good portrait photo of yourself, so that we can prepare the platform!
[Can be sent to: vit.chaloupka@gmail.com ]
7) Please prepare a short (2 to 3 minute) informal video about yourself.
Again, this is not obligatory – we know, w’re asking you a lot... – but we really hope you will join this idea! It would so helpful to get us a bit closer together! Don’t think of anything ‘professional’, just film yourself briefly with your cell-phone if you like, describe in a few minutes, in Chinese or in English (whatever suits you best) who you are and what you are doing. Mind: this could also involve a bit of info about other interests than professional ones, e.g. you could give us a brief glimpse of the environment in which you live: family, scenery, indoor impression, pet-animals, anything you think can help to ‘put you in place’...!
We would like to post these informal clips on our website roughly two weeks before the conference starts. So if you like to support our little plan, please send us your clip by 14 August at the latest. It should go to the same address as any pre-recorded paper presentations: vit.chaloupka@gmail.com. It should be a nice way for us to learn a bit more about one another in advance!
Anyone who registers formally for the conference will have access to the clips, the videos will remain accessible during the conference, and they will be taken off-line again one week after the conference ends.
Sorry, we are asking you a lot of things, but they can really make a big difference! In any event we look forward to hearing from you, to receiving your formal registrations on our site, and we trust that CHIME 2021 is going to be a gorgeous event!
See you ‘live’ on-line in September!
Frank Kouwenhoven (CHIME)
Lenka Chaloupkova (for our team in Prague)