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A more subtle characteristic of documents that may need to concern us is
their GENRE - the voice or style in which a document is written.
You would, um, like, be pretty darn surprised to find stuff like this in
a textbook, but not if it came to you over the phone. The genre of Email
seems to be settling somewhere between typical printed media and spoken
conversation, with special markings of sarcasm:) and expletives \#!?\%
common. Newspaper journalists are carefully trained to produce articles
consistent with what newspaper readers are expecting, and their editors
are paid to ensure that these stories maintain a consistent voice.
Scientific journal articles are written to be understood by peers in the
same field, according to standards that pertain to that community [Bayermann88] . An important
component of this audience-focus is the vocabulary choice an
author makes (cf. §8.2.1 ); stylistic
variations and document structure may differ as well. In a field like
psychology, for example, it would be difficult to get a paper accepted
in some journals if it is not subdivided into sections like
``Hypothesis,'' ``Methodology,'' ``Subjects.'' Legal briefs are also
written in highly conventionalized forms [BlueBook] , and legislation is drafted
to satisfy political realities [Goodrich87] [Levi82] [Nerhot91] [REF126] .
In part these variations in
genre are difficult to detect because they remain consistent within any
single corpus. That is, the typical email message would jump out at you
as out of place if it appeared in your newspaper, but probably not if it
were in the Letters to the Editor page. These examples highlight how
much {context} about the corpus we bring with us whenever we read
a particular document. They also foreshadow problems Web searchers are
just beginning to appreciate, as WWW search engines include every
document to which they can crawl, intermixing their very different
contexts and writing styles. Without the orienting features of the
newspaper's masthead, the ``Letters to the Editor'' rubric, or the
purposeful selection of a tool that scans only Usenet news, the browsing
users' abilities to understand an arbitrary document is diminished.
Individual textual passages have been stripped of much of the context
that made them sensible. As more and more of us generate {\em content}
-- in new hypermedia forms as well as traditional publications -- that
more and more of us retrieve, the range of genres we will experience can
only increase, and our methods for FOA must help to represent not just
the document but contextual information as well.
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Genre