Dear mersennaries

Please excuse my sending a long message outside the usual scope of the list. I would like to raise something which I think is of particular concern to the HPSTM/STS community, on account of our strong interdisciplinary tendencies.  

A couple of days ago, the following rattled into my inbox (please see my comments below) :

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Dear Colleague,

I am writing on behalf of the Organising Committee, to inform you of the call for papers for the:

THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON TECHNOLOGY, KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIETY
Cambridge University, UK, 9-12 January 2007
http://www.Technology-Conference.com

The conference will take a broad and cross-disciplinary approach to technology in society. With a particular focus on digital information and communications technologies, the conference will address: human usability, technologies for citizenship and community participation, and learning technologies. Participants will include researchers, teachers and practitioners whose interests are either technical or humanistic, or whose work crosses over between the technological, applied and social sciences.

As well as an impressive line up of international main speakers, the conference will also include numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations.  I would particularly like to invite you to respond to the conference call for papers. Presenters may choose to submit written papers for consideration before or after the conference in the fully refereed International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society. If you are unable to attend the conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in the journal, and give you access to the online version of the journal.

The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short abstract) is 31 October 2006. Proposals are reviewed within one week of submission.

Full details of the conference, including an online call for papers form, are to be found at the conference website - http://www.Technology-Conference.com

We look forward to receiving your proposals and hope you will be able to join us in Cambridge in January 2007.

Yours Sincerely,

Dr Marcus Breen
Department of Communication Studies
Northeastern University, Boston, USA

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(JS continues) I'm a historian of technology with a lot of social-science colleagues.  At first glance this doesn't seem greatly different from many of the perfectly respectable CfPs I receive from mailing lists such as mersenne.  

At second glance, however...  The entire reviewing process completed within *one week* of the CfP deadline?  This review panel is clearly the most efficient in academic history.  I can think of a dozen learned societies who'd be interested in poaching the lead organiser.  Speaking of which, who *is* the lead organiser?  Where does Dr Breen come in?  If he's chairing the Programme Committee, what is he chairing the Programme Committee *of*?  Academic meetings do not usually float free of all institutions and learned societies.  He can't be the local organiser, unless there's a high degree of confusion between the two Cambridges going on.  Do CRASSH know about this meeting?  Or the people at Free School Lane?  Or anybody we'd naturally expect to be on the ground for such an event?  Is this meeting at "Cambridge University" institutionally, or only geographically?  Why is every single reference I can find to the impressively-titled journal on the journal's own site, unless it's an announcement similar to this one?  

I can't say for definite what this meeting is.  I can only say that it bears close formal similarities to the "spamferences" -- what most of would understand as vanity-publishing opportunities with attached presentation sessions, aping the conventions of the academic conference and heavily advertised by unsolicited bulk email (spam) -- which became notorious a couple of years ago.  If your email address is publicly available on a University site, you may have fond memories of the "World Multi-Conference" (WMSCI) and associated meetings with glorious initialisms like CITSA and FOSSTEC.  

Trying to attack the premise of these meetings is like wrestling a jellyfish.  There's no evident fraud or passing-off.  The events are not "fake conferences" (they've been observed by credible witnesses actually taking place.)  While the publications are not valid "publications" in the specialist sense you or I or the dear old RAE would recognise, in a broader sense they are published.  The peer-review process no doubt meets its own high standards.  When pressed, the organisers of these events generally exploit any available overlap between the contexts of academic and "professional" conferences (more common on the science/engineering side) and sow as much confusion as possible.  

It's quicker and easier to address the medium than the message.  The email quoted above reached me as spam.  All unsolicited email distributed systematically to multiple recipients is spam, irrespective of content.  Spam is avoidable, antisocial, and (in the case of commercial messages) unambiguously unlawful in the UK and other EU states.  Spammers tend not to be very nice people.  

Thus a useful first question on encountering an unfamiliar approach is "why have I received this?"  If it's from mersenne or another list I recognise myself as having opted into, I have the reassurance that the sender is as happy to receive my news as I am to receive theirs.  If it arrives out of the blue, with no further personalisation than I get on my electricity bill, I assume it's someone who wants to make life worse for me, unless I can find very good reason why it might not be.  

In summary: 
- Please watch out for spamferences.  Several experienced colleagues have confused these messages with real academic conference announcements.  Their tendency to promote an interdisciplinary vibe, in the hope of attracting as many gulls as possible, can unfortunately be mistaken for commitment to one of our field's particular programmatic commitments. 
- DON'T FOLLOW THE 'UNSUBSCRIBE' LINK from anything you suspect to be spam.  This merely confirms to spammers that your address is valid.  Names and addresses given in unsolicited messages may not be what they appear; I'm not convinced it is useful to attempt to raise any dialogue with them at all.  
- You should not expect to have to receive this stuff.  Ask your institution whether it's aware of the problem and what it's doing to block it.  

Two digressive notes as a reward for struggling to the end of this:

(1) In 2005, some enterprising grad students at MIT made a useful point about supply and demand by responding to the automated WMSCI spam-announcements with an automatically-generated paper -- which was duly accepted despite being a stream of gibberish with no substantive content whatsoever.  This story was presented in a few newspapers as some kind of corollary to the Sokal hoax, but was actually making a simple point about spamferences and their standards.  The site at <http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/> includes superb video footage of the authors hosting their own 'parallel' conference in the same hotel as WMSCI, improvising presentations around their randomly-generated slideshows.  

(2) Having looked at the conference website at <http://technology-conference.com/>, as advertised above, I'm none the wiser as to exactly where physically in "Cambridge University" the meeting is meant to take place: let me know (directly, not via the list) if you have any imaginative suggestions.  The photos on the site seem to imply it may be (appropriately) the marketplace; or possibly the middle of Trinity Street, the roof of King's College Chapel, or the Old Lodge at King's.  If they advertise a plenary from the ghost of MR James then we'll know there's something amiss.  

Best regards
James