Genre in digital documents

The successful use of digital media requires the emergence of new or transformed genres of digital communication. By genres, we mean not just particular technologies, modes of communication or presentation, but complex communicative forms anchored in specific institutions and practices. These are the digital analogues of print forms like the newspaper and the annual report. This includes not just genres replicated from print form, but new and emergent genres that may not have existed in print form. This is the third year of this minitrack and a mature body of research is developing. This year’s papers are clustered into four (overlapping) continuing themes from previous years; evolved genes, form and function, genres in organizations, and managing digital documents. The first session presents very different evolved genres. Bouraev and his colleagues use linguisticallyintensive content analysis techniques to derive layers of document abstractions to aid readers in skimming and “zooming” into news stories. Fox, McMillan and Eaton present electronic theses and dissertations as a prime example of an evolved genre, including bookmarks and thumbnails, video clips, and even software to allow readers to generate their own programs based on the research in the dissertation itself. Erickson continues his work on collaborations through asynchronous, computermediated communication, particularly in conversations that occur via text. He shows that when users understand and support the generic nature of the collaboration, the collaboration can be highly successful and persistent over a long period of time. The second session examines form and function. Crowston and Williams examine the effects of patterns of linking on FAQs, a genre that they identified as “new” in their HICSS-30 paper. They suggest that when links provide navigation functionality as opposed to simply tying together pieces of a document, the FAQ genre begins to adapt to the needs and capabilities of the Web. Shepherd and Watters continue their exploration of cybergenre, genre represented by the triple, <content, form, functionality>. They attempt to classify Web pages at a high level of abstraction in order to examine and identify the functionality attributes of cybergenre. Toms and Campbell find that document structure plays a significant role in the user identification of genre and suggests that this has significance in interface design. The third session also returns to a continuing theme, genres in organizations. Bergquist and Ljungberg examined email messages in a large Swedish company and, while they do not view informal conversation as a genre, they found that such email conversation was used to discuss and negotiate which genre was appropriate to use in different situations. Westarp and his colleagues examined the use of the Internet by large corporations for the distribution of electronic versions of annual reports and suggest that there are such tremendous benefits to be gained by Internet-based reporting that this can lead to a new and superior genre of reporting. Tyrvainen and Paivarinta suggest that one should look for different document genres and genre systems to integrate with an organization’s processes, rather than trying to work with a universal definition of a document. In the final session, Rieffel discusses weaknesses with current digital documents for supporting the genre of mathematics writing. In particular, the static nature of links and documents is a serious problem for supporting mathematics. Vasudevan and Palmer propose a system for non-intrusive annotation of Web documents. Such a system supports the composition of personalized “virtual documents”, which has interesting implications for genre in the sense that not all users see the same document. Many of this year’s papers could have fit into more than the one session to which they were assigned. It is difficult to discuss genre in organizations without discussing management of documents, and form and function without discussing the evolution of new and emergent genre. There are two different views presented as to the function of conversation via text. Overall, we feel that Genre in Digital Documents has become a “persistent and collaborative” minitrack that has <content, form, and functionality>. Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1999