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Privacy Policy

Publishing Data

As an open access publisher committed to openness, Programming Historian collects a number of pieces of information about authors, translators, editors, and reviewers. This information is publicly displayed in the following file: https://github.com/programminghistorian/jekyll/blob/gh-pages/_data/ph_authors.yml, and is also used to populate various pages of our website with relevant information (eg, an author’s name and bio).

Depending on one’s role, the data collected may include:

In keeping with our open ethos, and to express our gratitude to authors, translators reviewers, and editors, we publicly acknowledge the names of all individuals who participate in one of these activities on the published lesson, and on our Project Team page (and its translations).

If you wish to contact us to discuss any data we may have about you, you can email our managing editor. You have the right to withdraw your consent to our use of this data, however, it should be noted that Right to Erasure may not apply to authors of a submitted article as we have a legitimate interest in keeping your data to identify you as the author of a published and indexed text.

Google Analytics Data

The Programming Historian also collects web traffic data. We use this data to identify the needs of our visitors, to identify types of lessons that are in high demand in certain geographic regions, to promote the success of the project with potential funders, partners, and outside bodies through summary statistics, and to conduct and publish research about digital humanities and teaching and learning.

None of the data collected by Google Analytics allows us to identify individuals.

Google Analytics sets a number of “cookies” on your computer when you visit the website. These may include:

_ga, _gat

You can block this using the “Do Not Track” settings in your browser

_utmv

This cookie is used by Google Analytics to determine the type of visitor that visits our website. The cookie determines the user’s preferences based on which webpages they visit, so that we may use this data to understand which are the most popular webpages and why people visit the website.

__utmz

This cookie is used by Google Analytics to determine the type of referral used by each visitor to arrive at our website. The cookie determines if the user has come directly to our website or via a search engine, e-mail or e-mail campaign. We use this data to understand how our users arrive at our website.

__utma

This cookie is used to identify unique visitors to our website. The results are sent to our Google Analytics account, so that we can see how many unique visitors come to the site over a period of time.

__utmb

This cookie is used by Google Analytics to determine the visitor session times on our website. Each time you visit a new webpage on the website, the cookie is set to expire within 30 minutes. If it does not find an existing cookie, a new one is created.

__utmc

This cookie is used by Google Analytics in conjunction with __utmb to determine visitor sessions. Unlike __utmb, this cookie does not have an expiry date. It determines whether a new session should be created based on whether you have previously closed your browser, re-opened it and come back to the website.

Session Data

To enable day or night mode on our site, The Programming Historian uses session storage to know your theme preference. Session storage is not a cookie, but instead uses web storage objects that are only available in your current tab of your broswer.

What this means is that if you select our night theme, and either navigate within our site; refresh a page within your tab; or leave our site and come back within the same tab, we will be able to keep your theme preference active. However, if you open a new window or tab, you will see that we default back to our day theme, since the session storage does not persist between browser windows or tabs.

You can read more about session storage in the Mozilla Web Documentation, but the most important thing to know is that we do not persist this session data in any database and it only exists in your browser.