Interpreting Genre Evolution on the Web:                             
Preliminary Results 
 
 
 Marina Santini University of Brighton 
Lewes Rd, Moulsecoomb Campus, 
Brighton, BN2 4GJ (UK) 
Marina.Santini@itri.brighton.ac.uk 
 
 
  
 
Abstract 
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. 
1 Introduction 
The study presented in this paper has been 
designed to explore the current state of genre 
evolution on the web through web users’ 
perception. The web can be interpreted, among 
other things, as a genre repertoire in evolution 
because there are still many genre labels which 
have not been consolidated and many web pages 
that cannot be sorted into a recognized and 
acknowledged genre. The interpretation  of the 
web as a genre repertoire in evolution has been 
developed within a research project on automatic 
identification of genre in web pages (Santini, 
2006b). This interpretation is an attempt to 
explain the high level of hybridism and 
individualization of many web pages, which 
result in classification intractability. The study 
reported in this paper shows that humans have 
the same problems as classification algorithms 
when it comes to less standardized and 
conventionalized web pages.  
As it has often been pointed out (for example, 
cf. Kwasnik and Crowston, 2005), it is hard to 
pin down the concept of genre from a single 
perspective or to find an agreed definition of 
what genre is. This lack is also experienced in 
the more restricted world of non-literary or non-
fictional genres, such as professional or 
instrumental genres, where the variation due to 
personal style is less pronounced than in literary 
genres. In particular, scholars working with 
practical genres focus upon a specific 
environment. For instance Swales (1990) 
develops his notion of genre in academic and 
research settings, Bathia (1993) and Trosborg 
(2000) in professional settings, Yates and 
Orlikowsky (1992) within organizational 
communication. Despite the lack of an agreed 
theoretical notion, genre is a well-established 
term (cf. Karlgren, 2004), intuitively understood 
in its vagueness. Classifying documents by genre 
is a common operation that humans perform with 
more or less effort.  
Genres can be seen as “artifacts”, i.e. cultural 
objects created to meet and streamline 
communicative needs. These cultural objects 
represent the role that a certain type of 
documents plays in an environment. Each genre 
shows a set of standardized or conventional 
characteristics that makes it recognizable among 
32
others, and this kind of identity raises specific 
expectations in the recipients, despite the 
fuzziness of genre labels (cf. Santini, 2005). 
Being cultural objects, showing common 
conventions and raising similar expectations are 
unifying traits. Together with these, there is a 
number of separating traits, such as hybridism, 
individualization, and evolution. In fact, genres 
are not mutually exclusive and different genres 
can be merged in a single document, generating 
hybrid forms. Genres are based on conventions, 
but allow a certain freedom of  variation and 
consequently can be individualized.  
Being artifacts, sharing conventions and 
expectations, showing hybridism and 
individualization, and undergoing evolution are 
important traits characterizing all sorts of genres. 
More precisely, genres can be defined as cultural 
artifacts, i.e. objects linked to a culture, a society 
or a community, bearing standardized features 
(conventions) but leaving space for creativity 
(individualization). On the one hand, 
standardized and recurrent features induce 
predictable expectations in the receivers. On the 
other hand, the freedom allowed by creativity 
allow genres to change, evolve, and be created to 
meet new needs (genre evolution), especially 
under the impulse of a new communication 
medium. While the change is still ongoing, i.e. 
before a modified genre is redefined, or a new 
genre is identified with a new name, documents 
show mixed forms and functions (genre 
hybridism). 
This view of genre is flexible enough to 
encompass not only paper genres (both literary 
and practical genres), but also digital genres and, 
more specifically, web genres, such as the 
personal home page. The personal home page 
has no evident antecedent in the paper world (cf. 
Dillon and Gushrowski, 2000). It sprang up on 
the web as a new cultural object servicing the 
community of web users. When browsing a 
personal home page, web users expect a blend of 
standardized information (self-narration, 
personal interests, contact details, and often 
pictures related to one’s life) and personal touch.  
Another important thing to notice is that 
before genre conventions become fully 
standardized, genres do not have an official 
name. A genre name becomes acknowledged 
when the genre itself has a role and a 
communicative function in a community or 
society (Görlach, 2004: 9). Before this 
acknowledgement, a genre shows hybrid or 
individualized forms, and undefined functions. 
For example, before 1998 web logs (or blogs) 
were already present on the Web, but they were 
not identified as a genre. They were just “web 
pages”, with similar characteristics and 
functions. In 1999, suddenly a community sprang 
up using this new genre (Blood, 2000). Only at 
this point, the genre label “web log” or “blog” 
started spreading and being recognized. 
Genre hybridism and individualization are 
evident on the web, and play an important role in 
the change and the creation of new genres. In 
fact, web pages – which can be considered as a 
new kind of document, much more unpredictable 
and customized than paper documents (Santini, 
2006a) – are often hybrid because of intra-genre 
and inter-genre variations. They are also highly 
individualized because of the creative freedom 
provided by HTML or XML tags (the building 
blocks of web pages) or programming languages 
such as Javascript. On the web, new genres are 
constantly added (blogs, clogs, eshops, wikis, 
etc.)  and traditional genres are adapted or 
updated in order to include more or different 
functionalities (online front pages, ezines, net 
ads, etc.). Genres such as emails, newsletters, 
search pages, eshops, etc. were a futuristic 
prophecy only 10 or 15 years ago, while today 
they belong to the normal life of a web user. 
Presumably, other genres will soon be added to 
meet new communicative needs brought about 
by new technologies. 
As any other evolutions, also genre evolution 
proceeds along the axis of time. It is a diachronic 
process. There must be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. 
What often hallmarks a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ is 
the introduction of a new communication 
medium within a culture, a society, a community. 
The added value of studying genres on the web 
(a new medium) is represented by the possibility 
of following the development of genres and 
genres repertoires live, i.e. while it is taking 
place, and not a posteriori. That is, on the web 
we can capture synchronically a diachronic 
process. From a synchronic point of view, the 
genre repertoire is a continuum, where there are 
three forces interacting: what we bring from the 
past (reproduced genres), what is new or adapted 
to the new environment (novel genres and 
adapted genres), what is going to emerge and is 
not fully formed yet (emerging genres).  
This view of genre evolution complements 
previous studies on the same subject (cf. 
Crowston and Williams, 1997; Shepherd and 
Watters, 1998; Kwasnik and Crowston, 2005). 
The main contribution of the synchronic 
33
continuum is that an additional force has been 
acknowledged to take part in the evolution 
process, i.e. emerging genres. Emerging genres 
are those that are not fully standardized, that are 
still in formation and for which a genre label has 
not been created or have a label which is still 
opaque to the majority of users. Currently many 
web pages are in this phase of evolution, 
showing a high level of hybridism or 
individualization. We suggest that the subjects’ 
perception of these web pages can be interpreted 
in term of genre evolution.  
The study reported in this paper provides a 
snapshot of the current state of the genre 
repertoire of web pages seen through the 
perception of web users. Although this view 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, 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 largerly 
disagree on assigning labels to them. 
The article is organized as follows: Section 2 
presents a short overview of previous work; 
Section 3 describes the web study and presents 
preliminary results; in Section 4 some 
conclusions are drawn.  
2 Previous Work 
No studies have been carried out so far on users’ 
perception of a genre repertoire in transition.  
Crowston and Williams (1997) were the first 
who reported on the genre repertoire on the web. 
They identified 48 reproduced and emergent 
genres in a sample of about 1,000 web pages. 
A few user studies were carried out with the 
more pragmatic approach of exploring the 
usefulness of genre to improve web searches and 
defining a genre palette appropriate for this 
purpose. The most comprehensive study related 
to genre effectiveness for web searching is 
recent. Rosso (2005) carried out a series of four 
linked experiments, all based on human subjects. 
Quite surprisingly, the conclusion drawn by the 
author was that genre-annotated search results 
produced no significant improvement in 
participants’ ability to make more consistent or 
faster assessment on the relevance of search 
results (Rosso, 2005: 133-179). In fact, only 17 
of 32 participants reported noticing the genre 
label (Rosso, 2005: 176). Most probably, as 
pointed out by the author, this outcome was 
influenced by the difficulty and complexity of 
the task, together with the limitations of the 
setting (Rosso, 2005: 170-172). 
Rosso’s attempt to assess the relevance of 
search results including genre labels was almost 
unique. All other studies with web users, in 
contrast, did not provide any assessment of how 
well genres improved a web search. These 
studies are more like surveys on users’ 
preferences in terms of useful non-topical 
categories that can help restrict web searches. 
Along this line, Meyer zu Eissen and Stein 
(2004) built a genre palette for the web using two 
criteria: usability and feasibility. Their user study 
was based on a questionnaire where they asked 
about search engine use, usefulness of genre 
classification, and usefulness of genre classes. 
Interestingly, the authors note that one of the 
inherent problems of genre classification is that 
“even humans are not able to consistently specify 
the genre of a given page” because web pages 
have different functions, i.e. they might be 
hybrid forms, as in the case of product 
information sites that are combined with a 
shopping interface.  
Roussinov et al. (2001) carried out a 
exploratory study of web users in order to 
identify what genres they most/least frequently 
come in contact with, and what genres most/least 
address their information needs. In their study, 
carried out in 2000, 116 different genres were 
identified, but not all web pages could be 
classified.  
Karlgren (2000: 99 ff.), a pioneer in building a 
genre palette, tried to collect genres that were 
both consistent with what users expect as well as 
conveniently computable. He sent around a 
questionnaire where the core question was: 
“What genres do you feel you find on the 
WWW?”. He ended up with a palette of 11 
genres. One frequent comment by the 
respondents was that the genres in the palette 
were not mutually exclusive, in other words they 
showed some level of hybridism. 
 Very informative in many respects, these 
studies have in common the practical aim of 
improving web searches. This might explain why 
they overlook difficult issues such as the 
hybridism or the individualization of many web 
pages, which are nonetheless perceived by the 
subjects. The authors must necessarily focus on 
34
unambiguous exemplars, showing clear-cut 
conventions and expectations.  
The present study, on the other hand, 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.  
3 Web Study  
The study described in this section was web-
based. It was uploaded on to one of the servers at 
University of Brighton at the end of February 
2005, and kept online for one month.  
The study is based on participants who 
volunteered within the University of Brighton 
(UK), University of Sussex (UK), Dalhousie 
University (Canada), Syracuse University 
(USA), plus other academics (interested in 
genre-related issues) in other universities and 
research institutes in Europe. Potential 
participants were sent an email containing the 
URL of the study on the web.  
3.1 Population and Sample: Academic 
Environment 
Genre recognition and acknowledgement is 
based on elements like education, culture, 
community, and society. The academic 
population on which the study is built upon has 
three elements in common: 
• it is a medium-high educated population 
(from administrative people to students 
and professors);  
• it is very used to computer-meditated 
communication; 
• it is familiar with the Web. 
3.2 Web Pages and Web Genres  
Web pages were chosen by the author of this 
paper from the live Web and from the SPIRIT 
collection of web pages (Joho and Sanderson, 
2004). Three typologies of web genres and web 
pages were hypothesized for the selection and for 
the study (the web pages included in the study 
are available, together with their URLs, at 
http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Marina.Santini/: 
  
1) Easy web genres:  
1. eshop (web_page_01) 
2. personal home page (web_page_02) 
3. front page (web_page_04) 
4. search page (web_page_05) 
5. corporate home page (web_page_11) 
6. FAQs (web_page_12, the word “FAQs” 
was deleted from the heading) 
7. splash screen (web_page_24) 
8. net ad (web_page_2) 
 
2) Ambiguous web genres:  
9. email (web_page_03, because of the 
format and the granularity: email vs. 
mailing list)  
10. sitemap (web_page_06, the words 
“sitemap” and “hotlist” were deleted 
from the heading) 
11. hotlist (web_page_15,the word 
“hotlist” was deleted from the 
heading),  
12. academic personal home page 
(web_page_08)  
13. about page (web_page_10) 
14. organizational home page 
(web_page_14) 
15. blog (web_page_07) 
16. clog (web_page_16,blog and clog could 
be swapped in their interpretation)  
17. search by multiple fields 
(web_page_17)  
18. online form (web_page_10, online 
forms and search by multiple field 
can appear very similar) 
19. newsletter (web_page_19, which was 
presented truncated),  
20. howto page (web_page_20) 
21. online tutorial (web_page_22, online 
tutorial is a super-genre of howto 
pages) 
 
3) Difficult web pages:  
22. ezine cover (web_page_13) 
23. “Adirondack Orienteering Klub” 
(web_page_18, the author could not 
find a genre for it) 
24. CitiDex (web_page_21, the author 
could not find a genre for it) 
25. Collimating Lens Holder (web_page_23, 
the author could not find a genre for 
it) 
 
The expectation was that easy web genres would 
collect the highest rate of agreement, ambiguous 
web genres would receive a lower agreement 
rate, while difficult web pages were expected to 
be the most controversial in users’ perception. 
The term “genre” was never mentioned in the 
whole study in order not to influence or confuse 
the participants. The goal of the study was not 
declared either because the idea was to ask for a 
genre classification of web pages implicitly and 
study the reactions. Participants were simply told 
to assign “labels” to web page “types”. 
3.3 Participants’ Task and Sample Size 
The task of participants was straightforward. 
They had to go through 25 screenshots of web 
pages and assign one of the 23 labels to each of 
them.  
The total number of users who started the 
experiment was 198. 135 participants went 
35
through the whole study and provided valid 
responses for the experiment.  
3.4 Results 
Currently, there is no standard test largely agreed 
upon that can be used for experiments where 
subjects can make choices from a large number 
of categories (23 labels) for a large number of 
objects (25 web pages). In the following 
paragraphs some views and interpretations of the 
data are presented, namely raw counts and 
percentages, Fisher’s exact test, and adjusted 
residuals. 
Raw Counts and Percentages. A view on the 
data is offered in Table 2, which shows the 
number of subjects assigning a particular label to 
a particular web page and the percentage of the 
most voted label. For example,  the label eshop 
(8th row) was assigned to WP11 (first column) by 
119 subjects (highlighted cell), which 
corresponds to 88.15% (bottom row). Four 
subjects thought that WP1 was a corporate home 
pages (around 2.9%), seven selected net ad 
(around 5%), one subject chose front page 
(around 0.7%), one hotlist, one did not know, two 
added a new label for it (around 1.4%).  
Three  ranges of agreement can be identified 
out of this table. The top range includes web 
pages with a percentage of agreement above 
80%; the middle range groups web pages with an 
agreement between 79% and 50%; finally the 
bottom range contains web pages with an 
agreement between 49 % and 20%. Table 1 lists 
the web pages by percentage of agreement.  
From these ranges a first conclusion can be 
drawn. According to the ranges shown in Table 
1, participants show the highest agreement on 
what we selected as “easy web genres”, except in 
three cases: front pages, net ad and splash screen, 
which seem among the least agreed upon (see 
bottom range). The middle range includes most 
of the ambiguous web genres together with 
ezine, which was deemed to be difficult by the 
author. The bottom range includes the rest of the 
ambiguous genres, together with other difficult 
web pages  and three web pages from the top 
range, webpage_type_04 (front page), 
webpage_type_24 (splash screen) and 
webpage_type_25 (net ad).  
We have now a first picture of users’ 
perception of some web pages in relation to some 
web genre labels. The hypothesized genre 
                                                 
1 WP1, WP2, WP3, etc. are short form of 
webpage_01, webpage_02, webpage_03, etc.  
recognition pattern was mostly confirmed in the 
top range, but slightly reshuffled in the middle 
and bottom ranges. Figure 1 shows the charted 
percentages.  
Fisher’s Exact Test. The percentages at the 
bottom row in Table 2 can be interpreted in 
terms of conditional distribution on the most 
voted label (response variable) per web page 
type (explanatory variable). In other words, they 
refer to the sample distribution of most voted 
labels, conditional to the web page type. In terms 
of association, this means that the distribution of 
the response variable (the label) changes with the 
value of the explanatory variable (the web page 
type) if the two variables are related. Table 2 
suggests the existence of an association or 
correlation between the label and  the web page 
to which this label was assigned. But as Table 2 
refers to the sample rather than the population, it 
provides evidence but not the final answer to 
whether labels and web page types are associated 
in the way suggested by the percentages. In order 
to see if it is plausible that labels and web page 
types are associated in the population, Fisher’s 
exact test can be calculated. The value returned 
for this test by SPSS is 9292.275, which is large 
enough to reject the hypothesis that labels and 
web page are independent2. This statistically 
significant association shows that the web pages 
chosen by the author to represent some web 
genres mostly map the subjects’ perception of 
these web pages. It also shows that many genre 
labels are acknowledged by the users and are 
consistently associated to web pages. 
Adjusted Residuals: A test statistic, such as 
Fisher’s exact test, and  statistical significance 
summarize the strength of evidence against the 
null hypothesis of independence, but does not 
indicate how many and which cells deviate 
greatly from this hypothesis. Residuals, i.e. the 
differences between expected and observed cell 
frequencies can help in this task. In particular, 
adjusted residuals can indicate if the cell counts 
are significantly different from what 
independence predicts. A large adjusted residual 
provides evidence against independence of a cell. 
As Table 3 mostly maps Table 2, a significant 
association between genre labels and web page 
types on the cells containing the most voted 
labels is then confirmed. 
                                                 
2 The larger the value, the greater the evidence against 
the null hypothesis of independence. 
36
3.5 Discussion 
The original impression that there were different 
degree of perception of genres of web pages was 
confirmed by these preliminary results. Also the 
rough distinction into three levels of genre 
awareness (easy, ambiguous and difficult) was 
confirmed. Three ranges of perception came out 
clearly from percentages, but the distribution of 
the web pages into these three ranges is slightly 
different from what was expected.  
The general view of the results (Fisher’s test) 
reveals that there is a significant association 
between the 25 web pages and the 23 labels. The 
analysis of adjusted residuals support this 
interpretation.  
The agreement among subjects on the label to 
assign to a particular web pages can be divided 
into three levels.  
At the first level, which can be interpreted as 
the highest perception of web genres, there are 
web pages labelled as personal home page 
(webpage_type_02), eshop (webpage_type_01), 
corporate home page (webpage_type_11), FAQs 
(webpage_type_12), and search pages 
(webpage_type_05). We can define these labels 
as stable web genres.  
At a middle level of perception, there are web 
genres still emerging. Most of the labels are 
fairly novel (ezine, clog, blog, about, how to), 
sometimes not entirely transparent, and some of 
them are specialized (academic home page, 
organizational home page, online tutorial). 
Probably the textual conventions of these genres 
are not entirely standardized yet and can cause 
oscillation in users’ perception. This level offers 
the most interesting view on a genre repertoire 
which is moving and evolving and it is not 
consolidated yet. 
The bottom range shows a blurred level of 
perception for different reasons. For some genres 
such as email and newsletter, the presentation in 
form of screenshots was not ideal. Subjects could 
not navigate through the web page and they 
could not resolve the level of granularity. For 
instance, for webpage_type_03 (the web page 
selected by the author to represent an email), 66 
subjects chose email, but 34 subjects preferred to 
add a new label for it and 20 thought it was an 
about page. Surprisingly, labels such as splash 
screen and front page for webpage_type_04 and 
webpage_type_24 were not favoured by the 
respondents who preferred to add their own 
labels in many cases. For webpage_type_06, 
subjects preferred the label search page instead 
of sitemap. Another interesting case is net ad 
(webpage_type_25), which was often assessed as 
eshop, probably because the concept of 
advertising and selling are closely related. The 
most opaque label seems to be hotlist 
(webpage_type_15) because most subject 
preferred to add their own label. Three of the 
four web pages that were classified by the author 
as “I don’t know” belong to this level of 
perception. While webpage_type_21 fell into the 
middle range because most of the subjects 
perceive it as a search page, the genre perception 
or interpretation of webpage_type_17, 
webpage_type_18, and webpage_type_23 is not 
so straightforward. For instance, 
webpage_type_17 was assessed as online form 
(57 subjects), search page (26 subjects), an eshop 
(26 subjects) and probably it is has all these 
functions at the same. 
4 Conclusions and Future Work 
The study shows a composite picture of the 
perception of the genre repertoire on the Web. 
This picture focuses on recent genres only, 
overlooking those more based on paper genres 
because, in our opinion, this hot area can reveal 
more about the dynamics behind genre evolution.  
Preliminary findings coming out from this 
study confirm the initial hypothesis and show 
that users’ perception can be divided into three 
ranges. These three ranges can be interpreted in 
terms of genre evolution: high perception for the 
most stable and acknowledge genres; medium 
perception for emerging genres, not fully 
acknowledged by the majority or still unstable, 
and finally low perception for the highly 
ambiguous genres (for different reasons). Some 
of the new web genres can be unambiguously 
perceived (for example, personal home page, 
eshop, corporate home page, FAQs and search 
page).  
Web users can also handle a certain degree of 
granularity, for example by distinguishing a 
personal home page from a corporate home page, 
but the boundary between academic home pages 
and organizational home pages is still too fuzzy 
for them.  
The approach to the web as a genre repertoire 
in evolution and these preliminary findings can 
turn out to be useful when building web genre 
palettes or when designing new genre 
identification experiments.  
Future work includes the computation of 
agreement coefficients. K statistic is largely used 
37
but still controversial and mostly used for 
measuring the agreement of two or three raters. 
Two new interesting measures to assess users’ 
recognition of web page genres were used by 
Rosso (2005: 109 ff.), but their full interpretation 
is still under study. The challenging follow up of 
these preliminary results is to find an objective 
coefficient of agreement applicable for 135 raters 
that can choose among 23 categories to classify 
25 objects. 

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