How to read these comparisons

Every number here comes from the readers' own databases. Synkrisis adds no data of its own; it lines the archives up.

What is compared

Each archive reads the printed programs of one conference series. A listing is one person in one role in one session, so a person who chairs and presents is listed twice. A session is a panel, workshop, keynote or similar unit the program prints. Programs are plans, so none of these counts says who attended or what was said.

Why shares and rates

The archives differ in size by a factor of thirty. A count of people in a small archive can only be read against that archive's own totals, so charts of counts are for shape, and comparisons across archives use shares or rates per 1,000 titles.

Gaps and weak years

A year with no program leaves a gap in a line instead of a zero. A year read from a heavily OCR'd scan is drawn as a diamond, and those years are left out of the people matches. Each archive's own caveats are on the overview and in its reader.

People

No page names a person, and counts under five are not shown. People are matched on first and last name, with a stricter tier that also needs a shared institution; the matching rules are on the Prosopographia page.

Adding another conference

A new archive appears here after three steps: build its database to the contract in check_series.py, add an entry to series.json, and run build_synkrisis.py. The pages, the overview table and the landing page read the registry, so none of them changes. Up to eight archives can be compared at once because the chart palette has eight fixed hues.