Hi y’all,
I’ve built a set of tools for reading conference programs as an archive, for disciplinography and historiography of rhet/comp and writing studies. They cover 125 printed programs from five series: CCCC, IWAC, Computers and Writing, CPTSC, and the Conference on Community Writing. The earliest program is 1974 (Cs) and the latest is a pre-convention listing for 2027.
Each series has its own reader, with a census of the people and sessions listed in each year, printed affiliations matched to institutions and mapped, networks of people listed in the same session, word counts in session and paper titles by year (per 1,000 titles, with the raw counts underneath), search, and a corpus builder for pulling the subset you want to work with a given dataset specifically. A sixth tool, Synkrisis, sets all five series side by side on years, institutions, title vocabulary, and people listed in more than one series. This allows for cross-conference comparisons
This a sister project to Pinakes, the journal index (pinakes.wacclearinghouse.org).
Project page: https://justalewis.github.io/project.html?p=conference-program-archives
The tools: https://wacc-conference-reader.fly.dev/
Write-up with screenshots: https://justalewis.substack.com/p/conference-culture-cccc-iwac-c-and
Pinakes: https://pinakes.wacclearinghouse.org
Thanks for reading and reach out with any suggestions/questions!
Justin Lewis
English Coordinator and Instructor of English
Olympic College