Genres Of Digital Documents

The study of genres—the fusion of content, purpose and form of communicative actions—stretches back hundreds of years to the beginnings of self-reflective human communication. Greek philosophers and orators recognized that the content of the message is not always its most important aspect; rather, the delivery, the context, and the rhetorical structure all play complementary roles in the subtle but profound act of one human being transferring information to another and thereby creating meaning from that transfer. As well, we have long had an awareness that the concept of genre is not only critical to communication, but, indeed, worthy of study in its own right. Because a “genre” is not any one thing, but rather an intersection of several phenomena in a context of use, its study has spanned many disciplines and areas of praxis, from the arts to metadata schemes. In this e-book four papers are presented that address fundamental questions about genre, and that extend the study of genres to the environment of the World-Wide Web.Previously published in: On The Horizon, Volume: 18, Number 2, 2005