AJLS Conference Analytics

Association for Japanese Literary Studies — 26 Years of Conference Data

26 Conferences

1,115 Presentations

621 Scholars

360 Panels

271 Institutions

1999–2025

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Topic Evolution

How research themes, literary figures, genres, and historical periods have shifted across 26 years of AJLS presentations.

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Co-Paneling Network

Who presents with whom at AJLS — a force-directed network of scholarly collaboration through shared panels.

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Institutional Presence

Which departments dominate the conference — heatmap of institutional participation over time with animated rankings.

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Presenter Careers

The regulars who shape the field's conference culture — dot timeline of repeat presenters and newcomer rates.

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Panel Themes

What gets a panel at AJLS — treemap of panel topics, conference composition, and theme alignment analysis.

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Geographic Footprint

Where AJLS scholars come from — packed circle map of institutional regions with diversity trend analysis.

Quick Insights

Most frequent presenter: Atsuko Sakaki (12 appearances over 12 years, 2000–2024)

Most represented institution: University of Chicago (36 total presentations)

Most discussed literary figure: Genji monogatari (18 title mentions)

Hottest rising theme: Technology & Media (grew from 15 mentions in 1999–2005 to 29 in 2020–2025)

Most interconnected scholar: Atsuko Sakaki (31 unique co-panelists)

All Conferences

Year	Location	Theme	Panels	Presentations	Presenters

Data Downloads

ajls_title_topic_assignments.csv

Topic assignments from paper and panel titles

ajls_term_by_year.csv

Term counts by year and category

ajls_literary_figures_by_year.csv

Literary figure mentions by year

ajls_periods_by_year.csv

Historical period mentions by year

ajls_copanel_edges.csv

Co-paneling edges (individual)

ajls_copanel_summary.csv

Co-paneling pairs (aggregated)

ajls_presenter_stats.csv

Presenter statistics

ajls_institution_stats.csv

Institution statistics

ajls_conference_stats.csv

Conference-level statistics

ajls_institution_by_year.csv

Institution participation matrix

CSV files are located in data/ajls/. The analysis report is at reports/ajls_analysis_report.txt.

Methodology

Data was scraped from the AJLS Google Sites archive covering 26 annual conferences from 1999 to 2025. Three conferences (2022–2024) were supplemented with program data from host institution websites and AJLS newsletters.

Coverage: 88.4% of presentations have paper titles; 98.2% of presenters are matched to the project's persons database. Topic extraction uses regex-based keyword matching against paper titles and panel titles, with diacritics flattening for Japanese romanization variants. Abstracts are not available from conference programs.

Limitations: Older conferences (pre-2005) have lower title coverage due to concatenated text formatting on Google Sites. The 2020 and 2021 conferences were merged into a single virtual event due to COVID-19. Some institutions appear under variant names (e.g., "UCLA" and "University of California, Los Angeles").

About This Visualization

Methodology

This dashboard provides an overview of the AJLS (Association for Japanese Literary Studies) conference data analysis project, covering 26 annual conferences from 1999 to 2025. The summary statistics show the scale of the dataset: conferences, presentations, unique scholars, panels, and institutions.

Navigation cards link to six specialized visualizations, each examining a different facet of the conference data — topics discussed, co-paneling networks, institutional representation, presenter career trajectories, panel theme analysis, and geographic diversity. This project analyzes AJLS conference programs as a window into the evolution of Japanese literary studies as an academic field.

Data Source

The AJLS conference dataset was built by scraping and parsing program text from the association's Google Sites archive (1999–2025). A custom regex-based parser handles the diverse formatting across 26 years of programs, extracting presenter names, institutional affiliations, paper titles, panel groupings, and roles (presenter, discussant, chair, keynote, etc.).

Data Processing

Name normalization: Two-pass cleanup consolidated ~730 raw name variants to ~630 canonical forms, handling garbage entries (timestamps, room numbers), role-name concatenations, initial matching, and nickname expansion.
Institution normalization: ~530 raw institution strings mapped to ~275 canonical forms through 191 alias entries.
Person matching: ~78% of presenters linked to individuals in a broader database of Japanese literary studies scholars built from ProQuest dissertations, the Academic Family Tree, and other sources.

Panel Corrections

Panel assignments for some early conferences were corrected using PAJLS (Proceedings of AJLS) tables of contents from Brandeis University's digital archive, which provided authoritative section groupings for published proceedings.

Limitations

Conference program formats vary significantly across 26 years, leading to parsing quality differences.
Not all presenters could be matched to the broader scholars database.
Institution affiliations are self-reported and may change between conferences.