Conventions and Mutual Expectations -- understanding sources for web genres
This work addresses the challenge of understanding web genres for researchers in information and language technology, though it appears incremental in its approach.
The paper investigates genre variation and change by analyzing reader and author behaviors as knowledge sources, rather than focusing on textual analysis, to bridge sociological and statistical perspectives on genres.
Genres can be understood in many different ways. They are often perceived as a primarily sociological construction, or, alternatively, as a stylostatistically observable objective characteristic of texts. The latter view is more common in the research field of information and language technology. These two views can be quite compatible and can inform each other; this present investigation discusses knowledge sources for studying genre variation and change by observing reader and author behaviour rather than performing analyses on the information objects themselves.