This one came in the email:
On Dec 5, 2022, at 12:01 PM, ** <**@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I just wanted to know if you’re interested in acquiring the email-list of Modern Language Association of America 2023
Please let me know your thoughts on this so that I can share with you the number of attendees and the cost.
Awaiting your reply.
Regards,
**
Marketing Manager
The bolding and highlighting was in the original.
I’m really tempted to reply to find out the number of attendees and the cost, but not so tempted that I want to get into an email conversation with a spammer. And, as David Owen memorably pointed out so many years ago in his report on the meeting of meeting planners, the people who go to the meetings are the attenders; it is the conference itself that is the attendee.
In any case, I just love the idea that someone’s out there hawking the MLA membership list. What’re they planning to sell to these people? Autographed copies of the complete works of Chaucer?
Whoever sent this to you bought a list with *your* name on it. They thought that was valuable… so they clearly have a bias to thinking any academic-related email list is valuable.
Jonathan:
I just love the idea of an MLA-targeted scam. Talk about fishing in a small pond! It’s like an outtake from a David Lodge novel.
A shrinking pont: https://www.mla.org/Convention/Convention-History/MLA-Convention-Statistics
*pond
I wonder what happened in 1970.
The big dropoff seems to be after 1968. Maybe related to the tumult of that year?
Maybe someone can do a regression discontinuity analysis to investigate.
Digital humanities research!
“I wonder what happened in 1970.”
It’s more a matter of what happened in 1964 to 1968.
Those were five hyperactive years, with levels returning to pre-1964 levels in 1969.
Someone who works at a university could go into the stacks and read the titles from the articles in the procedings for ’62 and ’63, and then from the hyperactive years, and then from ’69 and ’70, and report on what the trends were in subjects of interest in the field.
Or it could be something as plebian as funding: maybe there was gobs of money from somewhere those years.
The other day I got an invitation to chair a session at a conference, “in recognition of your outstanding work in field X”, totally unrelated to my field Y. It looked like one of those scam conferences, but I usually err on the side of being polite, so I told them there must be a mixup, I work in Y, not X, which is incidentally very, very, very far from Y.
The same day they wrote back, essentially telling me that they are happy to create a session on Y and I can chair it.
I am still struggling to figure out where they payoff is here. Conference participation is not something anyone cares about, even if it is a legit conference. It must more than a thousand euros (travel + hotel + fees) and a couple of days. So… who takes them on these things? Who finances that? Are there universities or similar where they at least pay lip service to participating in research _and_ have free money floating around for these things?
In the system used by my (wealthy European) country for assessing the output of academics at public universities, one can obtain “points” for presenting at conferences. These points are fairly trivial relative to what’s on offer for publishing in even low-impact journals, but so long as one stays within the system they are cumulative across one’s career and have an influence on one’s salary (e.g., if I get 1 point for presenting at random conference X this year, my salary in all subsequent years will be a tiny bit higher). Thus, there could be a lifetime payoff for attending such a conference, even if one has to pay out-of-pocket for travel and accommodation. (I say “could be” as I haven’t actually calculated the relative costs and benefits.)
How many members of the MLA would have decisions on book purchase at high school and tertiary education levels? I think something like English as a Second/Foreign Language sales are going to be a significant niche market.