The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) gathers researchers and musicians worldwide to share their knowledge and late-breaking work on new musical interface design. There are four tracks at the conference: papers, music performances, installations, and workshops. Each of these four tracks is represented in different ways, through text, audio, video, and so on.

Currently, only conference papers are systematically structured and archived. This list is based on BibTeX source files hosted on GitHub. PDF files of each paper are stored on Zenodo, with proper metadata and DOIs. The challenge with this approach is that the PDFs do not allow for embedding audio and video; hence they provide a suboptimal presentation of typical NIME contributions.

In 2021, the conference explored using PubPub as the publication system. Hence, all papers are online documents with embedded media. One challenge is to figure out how to handle the long-term preservation of this material. One approach is to export PDF files that can be added to Zenodo similar to previous years. Then we risk losing all the embedded media files. Another is to export HTML files together with media files and bundle these on Zenodo. This helps the archiving but provides a suboptimal user experience.

It has been a long-term interest in finding solutions for documenting and archiving information about the music performances, installations, and workshops at NIME. However, we have not found a proper solution for how to structure this information. Even more challenging is to figure out how to connect information between multiple tracks. Many interfaces are presented in papers and are either performed in concerts or shown as installations. Several questions arise:

  • How can we link information about such interfaces in various tracks?
  • How can we link information about interfaces across years to see how they develop over time?
  • How can we link information about individual’s contributions over the years?

The challenge is that while academic researchers are keen to get their publications online and structured properly, artists and arts-based researchers often focus more on their artistic outputs (which makes sense).