Georg's Comments

The page was too long. Thanks for the comments!

• "About Page": I can see why you came up with the current grouping, but the current scope of "About Page" contains different genres: "course description" is an established, traditional genre that can be found in hundreds of printed books that students can use to find the right courses for the upcoming semester. A "course description" contains some information about a course (name of lecturer, course of studies, date, schedule etc.), a short description, and usually a list of references or textbooks the students should buy or get from the library. I agree, a "course description" gives information "about" a course, but at the time a "personal homepage" gives information "about" a person and you wouldn't categorise it as an "about page". Every document is about something and in this case, "course description" is a distinct genre of its own. So is "mission statement", because in the "mission statement" a company, organisation or institution presents its goals in a very short and concise way. This genre, in turn, is different from "description of a work group" for which I found several conventions. What most of us mean by "About page" is a kind of digital imprint that states who the author of a website is, which company hosts the websites, and other information that are, in comparison to the core theme or content of a website, only of secondary interest.

I meant it like stated in the definition of CW/Rosso.

• Abstract/Expose: should be two different genres. An "abstract" is a summary of a text that already exists. An "expose" is a summary or an outline of a text that someone plans to write sometime in the future.

Andrea: And how should we know that just by looking at the text? I'd keep them together.

• Announcement and Invitation should be two distinct genres in my opinion, because "announcement" doesn't necessarily entail that an event is announced (for example, announcement of a newborn child).

• Application: yes, we need such a category. It will be interesting to see if there'll still be a clear-cut boundary between "document" and "application" in ten or 15 years time.
• "Biography (Portrayal, Obituary, CV/Resume)" should be the following distinct genres: "Curriculum vitae/resume" (in practically all cases written by the person in question), "biography" (sometimes, but not necessarily written by the person in question), "obituary" (written by someone else after the person in question has passed away). I don't see a good reason why we should group these clearly distinct genres together.

• Children's literature: my suggestion would be to delete this highly abstract category and to replace it with concrete genres such as "fairy tale", "painting book" etc.

• Column/Editorial: I don't see why this category should include "letter to the editor". The latter is clearly a different and very distinct genre. The usual "comment to a blog posting" is closely related to the traditional "letter to the editor".

Andrea: just following some other authors... read it a couple of times. How about "reader's feedback" including letters to the editor and comments in blogs?

• Commentary: this category (or the description?) is a bit too vague. What exactly is meant by "commentary"?

Andrea: Like defined in journalistic schoolbooks or here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kommentar_(Journalismus). I don't know the right word for that in english... but it's a well defined genre.

• I don't understand the individual comments at the "Comment on Text or Event" category. Why would we want to group clearly distinct genres together because we think that the current state of the art with regard to computational methods might have a hard time distinguishing the classes?

Andrea: because even humans have a hard time distinguishing them. Did you ever try? Which implies that there are only small differences in form/function That's why I'd like to keep this category.

In my opinion, we should under no circumstances whatsoever group together a set of genres (or classes of genres) as diverse as "commentary", "column", "essay", "legal opinion", "discussion". Someone might find a novel way of distinguishing these genres and then our reference corpus would have a huge hole. The annotation of a reference corpus should not be influenced by technical limitations. Therfore, I'm clearly against this abstract "comment" or "commentary" category.

• "Community": with regard to the Web 2.0, almost every website could be labeled a "community". What about social networks such as LinkedIn, XING, Facebook, StudiVZ etc.? This is an area where more descriptive research is needed. My suggestion would be to recognise that there are different types of social networks and that there's a group of genres that is used within these websites but that we try to take only documents into account, because, in a way, social networks are more like applications than documents. What we should have, however, are the two categories "discussion forum" and "thread in a discussion forum".

TBD

• "Contact form", "Consent form". A "consent form" is very different from a "contact form". You sign a consent form when you agree to something (for example, to an end-users license agreement by checking the "yes, I agree to these terms" box). These should be two distinct genres.

And you would call this single "I agree" Checkbox a Genre?? Most often, contact and consent go hand in hand. I'd leave it like that.

• Conversation Forum / Guestbook: I suggest to replace "conversation forum" with "discussion forum". Furthermore, "guestbook" should not be mixed with "discussion forum". Guestbooks are usually found on personal homepages and their purpose is that they don't have a specific purpose. Their only real purpose is to validate the person who published the guestbook, so other people can say: "Hey, nice to see you're online, cool website, please sign my guestbook now." Discussion forums, however, have clearly defined topics and purposes.

That's why we called it "Conversation Forum" - these are those off-topic, talk about random stuff forums. And these are quite similar to Guestbooks. We already have a different genre for dicussion forums.

• Corporate Blog: I strongly disagree with the current grouping of genres under this label. Although it might be contained within the "corporate blog", "Demographic data" is something completely different. "Server statistics" is also something completely different (usually automatically generated access information), so is "sports results", "test results" and "election results". My suggestion would be to keep "corporate blog", to delete the "test results" genre and to give "demographic data", "server statistics", "sports results" and "election results" their own genres.

Those were in data :)

• "Directory of Persons and Organisations": I guess it would be a good idea to rename this category into "Directory (of persons, organisations, or other entities)". The genre "genealogy" should be moved outside of this category because it is a completely different genre (although, yes, it mostly consists of persons grouped in a specific way, too).

I'd leave Genealogy inside. For me, the differences between a list of persons is a list of persons. Also, it is a very small genre (not many documents instantiating it exist). So it is too special and too small to include it in our list.

• "Encyclopedia": good example. Are we talking about genre labels for single HTML documents? If yes, we should rename the category into "encyclopedia article" because we won't find a single web page that consists of, for example, all Wikipedia articles (same goes for "dictionary" and "dictionary entry" and probably several other categories). "(Wikipedia)" should be replaced by "(such as, for example, Wikipedia or Everything2)".

I would combine these "Thing and Article/Entry of Thing" genres, because it nevertheless is the same. And noone can guarantee, that there is no encyclopedia on a single page. And in the end, this isn't really important and nobody gets hurt if we leave those categories together. For the sake of simplicity.

• "Entertainment - Contains jokes, puzzles, horoscopes, games. Overlaps with Content Delivery and possibly Media. /Andrea: This is difficult. I guess we have to split this up./" I agree, "entertainment" is too broad a category and it's not a genre. However, "joke", "puzzle", "horoscope" and "game" are. I suggest to delete "entertainment" and to introduce the aforementioned genuine genres.

• "Error Message / Empty Page / Under Construction Page": I don't see why we should group these, they are clearly different: an "error message" is issued by the webserver software automatically, its appearance can be modified by the webmaster. An "empty page" is, well, empty; this is not a genre, because no one intentionally creates an empty page with a specific purpose in mind. "empty page" should be deleted. An "Under construction" page, however, is created with a specific purpose: "Dear visitor, come back in the near future when there will be plenty of content here." My suggestion: delete "empty page", and give both "error message" and "under construction" their own genres.

What if the error occurs on the server, but is so severe that the server doesn't say anything - error or empty? Similar for under construction: often this is an adapted 404-error-page made by the provider. And even error pages have the purpose to say: "Come back later (I'm broken right now)"

An "empty page" is, well, empty; this is not a genre, because no one intentionally creates an empty page with a specific purpose in mind. "empty page" should be deleted.

Yes, there are! There's a group of nerds adding pages to their websites saying either nothing or "this page intentionally left blank" (http://www.this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org/) Keep in mind that nothing is too stupid to be found on the web :)

• "Explanation": this is a very abstract category under which several different genres can be grouped. My suggestion: delete this category, for it's not a genre.

• "FAQ / Help": these should be two distinct genres. "FAQ" documents have a very specific format (pairs of questions and answers), "help" documents are more general, they usually consist of detailed and exhaustive instructions or procedures to achieve a specific goal with regard to a certain software or website.

No - those are instructions. What i mean with "Help" is like FAQ (similar Form), only without the Questionmarks.

• "Forecast": Sorry, don't get it. These should be two distinct categories, "horoscope", and "weather report"/"weather forecast" (and probably additional genres that speculate about the future, such as "election forecast").

I split it up in "Forecast" and "Horoscope". The one that really makes forecasts and the one that invents something for entertainment? Adding one Genre for each thing you can make forecasts for is not feasible (and "wheather" and "elections" are topic!)

• "Gateway / Login (Rubleske) / Welcome Page (Rosso) / Splash Page": I don't know what a "welcome page" is, but a "login page" is clearly different from a "splash page". These should be two distinct genres.
• "Guide" should be renamed to "Travel guide" (to stress the scope of this label).
• "Homepage": I'm against this category for several reasons but I could live with it for the time being.
• "Index": we could also include the "sitemap" genre (although I'd probably put them into two different genres).
• "Link Collection, Bibliography": I very, very strongly suggest to use two distinct categories called "link collection" and "bibliography/list of publications". Just because both deal with lists doesn't mean that we should group them together. A "list of publications" has a very clear format that's been established for centuries, a "link collection" is something different entirely. I'd put "linkfarm" (nice one, by the way, Andrea!) as a third genre. Yes, they are bad and useless, but linkfarms are automatically generated with a clear purpose: to attract mostly automatic traffic from web crawlers to a certain set of websites in order to optimise the ranking of these websites in search engines. Very, very specific purpose and -- in my view -- clearly a genre.
• "List of Projects / Jobs" are two different things and they shouldn't be combined. Andrea, I don't see why "jobs are almost the same as projects". The style and formatting and expected information within job advertisements is clearly conventionalised. "Job advertisement" has to be a genre of its own.
• "Media": very difficult case because it's a very abstract container category. We should discuss this one later.
• "News article/press release": again, I'd say these are two different categories because a "press release" can be issued by any company, organisation, party, university etc. while a "news article" is usually published by the press.

But authorship/publisher is not genre! Purpose and Form are the same. Well, some press releases are more like Advertisement, we could put them into both genres.

• "Newspaper": see "dictionary" and "encyclopedia". Is it likely that we'll ever see a complete newspaper in a single HTML document? My suggestion: delete this category.

I saw one, that's why I added it :)

• "Official Report / Diagnosis": please delete "diagnosis procedure" from this category, because it is more a set of instructions. An "executive summary" is a kind of "official report" but it is also a summary of a longer document. This is why I'd remove "exec summary" here and move it into "abstract". Furthermore, I'd move "Annual report" into its own genre because there are clear conventions (in some countries regulated by law) what has to be included in an annual report.
• "Ordering Form / Booking Form". I'd move "Registration Form" into its own category because it has a different purpose (registering as a user with a website, usually for free) from "order form" (order one or more products, usually for a price), and even a different label ;-).
• "Petition / Prayer": sorry, but this grouping and the explanation made me laugh. These have to be two distinct genres. Several people can sign a petition for something, for example, to end world hunger, to stop cutting down the rain forest or to bring on a specific TV show for a new series. Isn't it obvious that this is different from "prayer"?
• "Promotional / Advertisement": the description which genres should be included in this category should be discussed later. To me it's not at all clear why we should group "Presentation of institutions, products and services", websites of "movie stars, singers", "most commercial homepages" (what is that?), "product information", "description of the features and/or benefits of a product", "page from an online store" and "classified ad" into a single category. This is another category that I'm not at all happy with and that we should discuss later.
• "Pornographic": this is another tough one. Strictly speaking, it's not a genre, but only a specific property or facet of a text, photo, or video. However, we should keep this category in to keep pornographic material out.

As sonemone here said - similarities in form (lots of pics of naked people) and definitely in purpose exist. This convinced me to see this as a genre.

• "Quotations": Singular or plural?
• "Research Report / Scientific Report / Academic - Text representing the outcomes of scientific research, including theses." Again, I fail to see why we should group together clearly distinct genres. My suggestion would be to have individual categories for "research/scientific report", "master/bachelor thesis", "PhD thesis", and "technical report".
• "Review / Testimonial": a "review" (independent assessment of something that someone else created, or produced) is different from a "testimonial" (in practically all cases a positive assessment used by someone who created something to promote his or her own product; I would use two distinct categories for "letter of recommendation" and "testimonial"). Also, "blurb" should not be included here. I wouldn't say that "blurb" is a genre. However, if we want to include it, it should be moved to "abstract/summary".

I'd keep it like this, bcause all three types of texts hve huge similarities in form and function (at least for the user, maybe not for the author)

• "Script": Maybe add synonymous labels such as "teleplay", "screenplay", "manuscript"?
• "Sermon": Aren't sermons a good example for genres that cannot be used on the web? Aren't all sermons recited in a church exclusively? The Wikipedia entry says: "Sermons are usually, but not always, delivered in a house of worship". My suggestion: delete this category (or move it to "Prayer").

I can easily imagine preachers that publish their sermons on the web. And prayers are something completely different (preacher tells his audience what to do vs. people bid/thank some god for something)

• "Shop/Shopping": Another very difficult category that subsumes a plethora of other genres. We should discuss this one in detail later.

• "Speech, Public Speaking": according to the definition, this genre cannot be instantiated online. Should we delete/exclude all genres (see "sermon") that are impossible to be found online?

Script of a speech. You can find them. Should we add it too script? Somehow I don't like it.

• "Thematic Forum / Newsgroup": There is a clear overlap with "Conversation forum" or "Discussion forum". We should probably have only one genre category.

This is our name for "Discussion Forum which has a topic"

• "Tutorial, Instruction, How-To": Again, I have problems with the arbitrary grouping of genres. A "recipe" (if a "cooking recipe" is meant) has conventions that are so ubiquituous that it should be a genre of its own (same as "cookbook", but, then, see "dictionary" and "encyclopedia"). A "manual" (comprehensive and exhaustive text that explains all functions that some machine or gadget has) is different from a "tutorial" (which introduces you to a certain gadget or software in order to teach you a basic set of functions). This, in turn, is different from a "how-to" because a "how-to" is not related to a specific machine or gadget, but to a specific outcome or goal.

now we have tutorial and instruction.