This visualization tracks the conference careers of individual AJLS presenters across 26 years (1999–2025). Each row represents one presenter, with colored dots marking their appearances at each conference. Dot colors indicate roles: blue for regular presenters, orange for keynote speakers, green for discussants and respondents, and grey for chairs, moderators, and organizers.
The minimum appearances slider filters to show only the most active participants. Hovering over a dot reveals the specific paper title and institutional affiliation for that appearance. The visualization reveals patterns of sustained engagement, emerging voices, and role transitions that mark career progression.
Data comes from AJLS conference programs (1999–2025), scraped from the association's Google Sites archive. Presenter names were normalized through a two-pass cleanup pipeline: 55 garbage entries removed, 71 name fixes, 54 aliases, plus additional fixes for initial-matching (e.g., A. Gerow → Aaron Gerow) and nicknames (e.g., Bob Tierney → Robert Tierney).
Role extraction uses regex-based parsing of program text, identifying keywords like “Discussant:”, “Chair:”, “Keynote:” that precede or follow presenter names. Roles are classified into: presenter (default), keynote, discussant, respondent, moderator, chair, organizer, and panelist.
Approximately 78% of presenter names are matched to individuals in a broader database of Japanese literary studies scholars built from ProQuest dissertations, the Academic Family Tree, and other sources.