Working draft. The text and tools are still being checked, and corrections are welcome.

Ethics

Convention programs are public documents. Putting 29 years of them in one place makes something the programs never were: a record of where each person has appeared. These rules limit what the reader does with that.

What the reader shows

  • Person pages exist only for people listed at two or more conventions. A one-time listing stays on its session page, where the program already put it, and the name is not linked.
  • “Often listed with” on a person page names only people who shared at least two sessions with them and have three or more listings of their own.
  • Institution pages name only people who have person pages. Everyone else is counted.
  • Group measures (first listings, return rates, shares by institution type) are shown for whole conventions or for groups large enough to be summarized, never for a person.

What the reader does not do

  • It does not rank, label or score people. It does not say who “left the field,” who has “never published,” or who is “influential.”
  • It does not guess gender, race or ethnicity from names.
  • It does not publish NCTE's session descriptions.
  • Search engines are asked not to index any page.

Errors and removal

Names are matched by software, and some matches are wrong. A person may appear under two spellings, or two people may share a page. Anyone listed can ask for a correction, a merge or a split, or ask for their page to be removed. A removed page stays removed through rebuilds. The row for a removed person stays in program-level counts because the program printed it, and no page gathers that person's listings.

To ask, open an issue on the repository or write to jlewis2@olympic.edu. Please give the name as printed and a year.

One limit: the dataset is also deposited at Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.23751615), and a deposit is a fixed copy that Zenodo keeps. Taking a page down here does not change that copy. If a name needs to come out of the deposit as well, write to the address above: a new version without it can be released, and Zenodo can be asked to withdraw the older one.

Using the exports

Exports carry names as printed in the public programs. For research about individuals, check with your institution's review board about whether it applies, and do not republish person-level rows without the context on how to read page.