@article {679, title = {The Evolution of Genre in Wikipedia}, journal = {Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics}, volume = {24}, year = {2009}, note = {+ pdf+ j pdf }, month = {2009}, pages = {1{\textendash}22}, abstract = {

This paper presents an overview of the ways in which genres, or structuralforms, develop in a community of practice, in this case, Wikipedia. Firstly, we collected data by performing a small search task in the Wikipedia search engine (powered by Lucene) to locate articles related to global car manufacturers, for example, British Leyland, Ferrari and General Motors. We also searched for typical biographical articles about notable people, such as Spike Milligan, Alex Ferguson, Nelson Mandela and Karl Marx. An examination of the data thus obtained revealed that these articles have particular forms and that some genres connect to each other and evolve, merge and overlap. We then looked at the ways in which the purpose and form of a biographical article have evolved over six years within this community. We concluded the work with a discussion on the usefulness of Wikipedia as a vehicle for such genre investigations. This small analysis has allowed us to start generating a number of detailed research questions as to how forms may act as descriptors of genre and to discuss plans for experimental work aimed at answering these questions.

}, keywords = {digital, evolution, genre, information science, wikipedia}, author = {Clark, Malcolm and Ruthven, Ian and Holt, Patrik O{\textquoteright}Brian} } @conference {1116, title = {Genre analysis of structured e-mails for corpus profiling}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2008 BCS-IRSG conference on Corpus Profiling}, year = {2008}, publisher = {British Computer Society}, organization = {British Computer Society}, address = {Swinton, UK, UK}, abstract = {

This paper reports on our approach to the analysis of genre recognition using eyetracking. We focused on a collection of different types of email which could represent different datasets, such as, mailing lists for calls for papers, newsletters, etc. We found that genre analysis based on purpose, form and layout features is potentially effective for identifying the characteristics of these datasets and we have highlighted some of the new important features of genres. The results from a pilot study showed a clear effect, with an interaction between the email texts and the visual cues or features perceived and also the strategies employed for the processing of the\  texts. We found, in our small sample, that readers can determine the purpose and form of genres and that during this process some readers do skim the shape of the e-mails (form).

}, keywords = {affordances constructivist, corpus, datsets, e-mail, ecological, eyetracking, genre, perception, profiling}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2227976.2227978}, author = {Clark, Malcolm and Ruthven, Ian and Holt, Patrik O{\textquoteright}Brian} } @conference {1121, title = {Structured text retrieval by means of affordances and genre}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1st BCS IRSG conference on Future Directions in Information Access}, year = {2007}, publisher = {British Computer Society}, organization = {British Computer Society}, address = {Swinton, UK, UK}, abstract = {

This paper offers a proposal for some preliminary research on the retrieval of structured text, such as extensible mark-up language (XML). We believe that capturing the way in which a reader perceives the meaning of documents, especially genres of text, may have implications for information retrieval (IR) and in particular, for cognitive IR and relevance. Previous research on \&$\#$39;shallow\&$\#$39; features of structured text has shown that categorization by form is possible. Gibson\&$\#$39;s theory of \&$\#$39;affordances\&$\#$39; and genre offer the reader the meaning and purpose - through structure - of a text, before the reader has even begun to read it, and should therefore provide a good basis for the \&$\#$39;deep\&$\#$39; skimming and categorization of texts. We believe that Gibson\&$\#$39;s \&$\#$39;affordances\&$\#$39; will aid the user to locate, examine and utilize shallow or deep features of genres and retrieve relevant output. Our proposal puts forward two hypotheses, with a list of research questions to test them, and culminates in experiments involving the studies of human categorization behaviour when viewing the structures of emails and web documents. Finally, we will examine the effectiveness of adding structural layout cues to a Yahoo discussion forum (currently only a bag-of-words), which is rich in structure, but only searchable through a Boolean search engine.

}, keywords = {affordances, categorization, genre, skimming}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2227895.2227912}, author = {Clark, Malcolm} }