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Cross-Conference Dashboard — Japanese Literary Studies

Presentations by Venue and Year

Multi-Venue Scholar Distribution

Pairwise Overlap

Theme Presence by Venue

Theme Trends Over Time

Topic Trends Over Time (Detailed)

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Inter-Venue Scholar Flow

Multi-Venue Scholars

Top Institutions Across Venues (Presentations)

Specialist vs. Generalist Institutions

DB Match Rate by Venue

Percentage of conference presenters found in the Japanese Literary Studies dissertation database. Higher = more disciplinary overlap.

Topic Profile Divergence (Jensen-Shannon)

Lower values = more similar topic distributions between venues.

Topic Profile Comparison (Normalized)

About This Visualization
Methodology

This dashboard provides a comparative view of Japanese Literary Studies conference presence across five major academic venues:

  • AJLS — Association for Japanese Literary Studies (specialist, 1999-2025)
  • AAS — Association for Asian Studies (area studies, 1995-2025)
  • MLA — Modern Language Association (languages/literatures, 1968-2026)
  • ACLA — American Comparative Literature Association (comparative lit, 1992-2026)
  • SCMS — Society for Cinema and Media Studies (cinema/media, 2008-2026)

Data spans from 1968 (earliest MLA convention program data) through 2026, with varying coverage windows per venue.

Data Sources: Conference programs harvested via Confex API, legacy HTML scraping (Wayback Machine), PDF text extraction, and PMLA/PAJLS proceedings. Japan-relevance determined by keyword filtering with human review.

Person Matching: Presenters matched across venues using normalized name comparison with the central persons database (727K records). Match rates reflect disciplinary proximity: AJLS (78.7%) → SCMS (21.3%).

Topic Classification: Titles classified into 15 thematic categories via keyword pattern matching against curated dictionaries. Anthropic Claude API used for NLP-enhanced classification where available.

Jensen-Shannon Divergence: Measures topic distribution similarity between venue pairs. Values range from 0 (identical) to ln(2) ≈ 0.693 (maximally different). Computed from normalized topic proportions.

HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index): Measures institutional concentration across venues. Values range from 0.2 (perfectly distributed across 5 venues) to 1.0 (present at only 1 venue).