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Session Recordings Extend the IMC 2021 Experience

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We know all too well that scheduling is a perennial frustration when attending international conferences, especially in-person. Until human cloning technology is perfected, it simply isn’t possible to divide yourself in two and be in two session rooms at once!

Groups of delegates walk towards the impressive decorated entrance to the Great Hall

Each year, regardless of whether the IMC is held online or on campus, our Programming Committee work hard to ensure that organisers’ requests to avoid clashes are actioned. We work hard behind the scenes to minimise these difficult decisions for delegates, but with a programme as large and complex as ours, we know there will always be tough choices as to which sessions to attend. This is especially true at an event with such a wide-ranging remit as the IMC, which strives to showcase the diversity and inter-relation of so many areas of medieval studies.

Since IMC 2021 will be held online, however, these difficult decisions may be made easier. All academic sessions will be recorded and the recordings will be available for all registered delegates to view on the virtual platform until 31 August 2021.

This means that if you miss a paper or session, the platform will remain live for several weeks and you can come back and view it again at a time that suits you.

This has many benefits for speakers and attendees, including extending the networking and social opportunities beyond the usual four or five days. We hope this will also be helpful for colleagues with caring responsibilities, health issues, or energy limitations that may make engaging with the dense IMC programme more difficult.

We are currently working with our virtual event platform provider, to resolve a technical issue affecting the automatic captioning of recorded sessions. In the meantime, delegates with any concerns in this regard should visit our recently updated Accessibility page which provides more detail both on enabling live captions on live sessions and on other support available.

The communications and networking tools on the platform, including the messenger and discussion forums, will also remain available until 31 August 2021. These can be used to contact friends and colleagues, as well as to reach out to new contacts, helping attendees continue scholarly conversations over this extended period.

Although this year we cannot mingle as medievalists together on our beautiful campus, we hope that this opportunity to extend the warm, enriching, scholarly atmosphere of the IMC will be appreciated.

If, for whatever reason, you do not want your paper to be recorded, please let us know by emailing imc@leeds.ac.uk by 1 May 2021. Where any one speaker opts out of recording, the entire session will be omitted from the recording schedule. Any non-recorded session will be marked as such on its Agenda session page.

Information about recordings, as well as general IMC 2021 timings, can be found here: https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2021/session-timing-information/

 

You can find out more about how IMC 2021 online will work via the PDF programme here: https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2021/programme/pdf/