Interpreting Genre Evolution on the Web: Preliminary Results

The study presented in this paper explores the current state of genre evolution on the web through web users’ perception. More precisely, it explores the perception of genres when users are faced not only with prototypical genre exemplars but also with hybrid or individualized web pages, and interpret the subjects’ perception in term of genre evolution Although this exploration is partial (23 labels to be assigned to 25 web pages), it offers an interesting section of the genre repertoire on the web. This study can be also seen as a confirmatory study, because it confirms that a number of recent web genres, unprecedented in the paper world (such as home page, FAQs, and blog) can be recognized by the subjects; others have not fully emerged and many web users are not familiar with their new genre labels; finally some web pages show a high level of ambiguity and web users largely disagree on assigning labels to them.