Most of the PDF programs on this site were first collected by Jennifer Marlow & James Purdy for their book Are We There Yet?. Following a 2022 discussion about the programs and a living archive for them, Tim Lockridge volunteered to build an archive for the conference programs—past and future. Rather than simply hosting the PDFs, however, Tim wanted to ensure they were accessible and usable for research purposes. Tim proposed this project to the Miami University Humanities Center, which provided seed funding and two undergraduate research apprentices for the 2022-23 academic year. Those apprentices (Alexa Johnson and Leah Vanasdale) cleaned OCR text, converted early PDFs to Markdown, and wrote initial HTML versions of programs—helping Tim build a prototype version of this site.
Each program is available to download available in multiple formats:
Tim continues to add additional programs to this site, and will do so until the site is current—and can then be updated annually. There is much work to do on the site (the search functionality alone has significant room for improvement) so look for improvements over time.
Note: We are missing several conference programs: 1987, 1988, 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1994. If you have any of these programs, please let Tim know!
The text of each program is extracted from the original PDF to Markdown using Amazon Textract. The text is then, with the assistance of a Large Language Model, written as structured Markdown and then converted (via a python script) to json. The website converts the json file to viewable HTML, and the search page looks for keywords in those json files.
The site itself was built with Tailwind CSS and significant javascript assistance from Claude and ChatGPT.