This visualization examines which academic departments and institutions have been represented at AJLS conferences over 26 years (1999–2025). Three complementary views reveal different aspects of institutional participation.
The heatmap shows the top 25 institutions across all conference years, with cell intensity reflecting presentation count. The bar chart race animates cumulative institutional contributions over time. The bump chart tracks rank trajectories for the top 15 institutions, showing which departments have risen or fallen in relative participation.
The sidebar provides concentration metrics (HHI index, top-5 share), geographic breakdowns, and information about first-time institutional appearances each year. Institutions are colored with their official university brand colors for easy identification.
Institution data comes from presenter affiliations listed in AJLS conference programs (1999–2025), scraped from the association's Google Sites archive and parsed with a custom regex-based pipeline.
Raw institution strings are processed through a multi-stage pipeline: concatenated text (e.g., “Ball State UniversityDazai Osamu’s...”) is separated, then mapped through 191 canonical aliases to standardize variants (e.g., “UC Berkeley”, “UCB”, “University of California at Berkeley” all become “University of California, Berkeley”). This reduces ~530 raw institution strings to ~275 canonical forms.
The top institutions receive colors matching their official brand palettes (e.g., Harvard crimson #A51C30, Princeton orange #E77500, Columbia blue #B9D9EB). Colors adjust for dark mode to ensure visibility. Institutions without defined brand colors appear in grey.
The HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) measures concentration: HHI = Σ(share²), where 0 indicates perfect dispersion and 1 indicates monopoly. Values above 0.25 indicate high concentration.