"这活动到底怎么了？"——2023年度总结'What Has Happened to This Group?': Review of the Year 2023

The Yanxia talk series held 41 sessions in 2023. Drawing on all the sessions and the feedback on them, this week we use our session time to look back and look ahead. What has the series become? In what direction will it go? Content Originality: Many interesting niche topics rarely mentioned in the Chinese-speaking world: this is like excavation Many topics widely discussed in other languages but missing from Chinese discourse: this is like translation Some passionate, original talks drawing on speakers' own experiences: this is creation, but it can't be planned for It feels like a history-and-geography set menu (32 sessions were related to history, 29 of them with a very clear regional focus). Many sessions followed the pattern of a story limited to a particular time and place, in the spirit of popular ideas such as microhistory and the citywalk. Networked storytelling: different sessions echo and connect with one another. Speakers often say: "As we mentioned in our session on XX..." Many Japan-related sessions (11 in total). This may reflect the great effort Japan has indeed made in history, culture and the arts. Format The session time can never satisfy everyone The process for posting announcements has not been very rigorous Publicity channels vary a lot Balancing and managing talk time and discussion time Realities and expectations worth discussing A balance is needed between being informative/academic and being distinctive/entertaining There may be a few too many Japan-related topics (about 11 sessions, a quarter of the total) There really have been a lot of history topics (only 9 sessions were unrelated to history, less than a quarter); literature and philosophy topics are genuinely hard to present without the texts The series is small and flexible; how do we keep a steady rhythm as we cross the river by feeling for the stones? Should we cut something, or add something?