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Genre Emergence in Amateur Flash

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Genres on the Web

Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 42))

Abstract

While genre emergence is a recurrent theme in research on digital media, studies of genre emergence tend to adopt approaches that do not clearly bring out role of the community in which the genres emerge. This chapter develops an approach in which a quantitative social network analysis informs our study of genre emergence in Flash animations posted to Newgrounds.com, a major web portal for amateur Flash. Results indicate that participants' social network positions are strongly associated with the genres of Flash they produce, and that social processes of support and competition are key to understanding genre emergence in the Newgrounds context. We argue from these findings that a social network approach can be crucial to understanding genre emergence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Biber uses the notion “text type” as a methodological intermediary in his approach, where the final interpretation is in terms of “register” or “genre” (which he treats as equivalent [2, 3], but cf. [12, 20] for a distinct sense of “register”). See also Chapter 14 by Grieve et al. (this volume) for these terms, as well as Biber et al. [5]; Biber and Kurjian [4]. There is also a distinct use of “text type” elsewhere [19].

  2. 2.

    For example http://newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=206373

  3. 3.

    For example http://newgrounds.com/gold/profile/template.php3?id=318335

  4. 4.

    The resemblance to Biber [2] in the number of genre features is entirely accidental.

  5. 5.

    The age and gender distributions of Newgrounds users are known from forthcoming studies not reported here.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank four anonymous reviewers and numerous colleagues in SLIS and Informatics at Indiana University for constructive criticism and comments regarding this work. An earlier version of this work was presented in January 2007 at the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikaloa, HI.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Library and Information Science and School of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47408, USA

    John C. Paolillo, Jonathan Warren & Breanne Kunz

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  1. John C. Paolillo
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  2. Jonathan Warren
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  3. Breanne Kunz
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Correspondence to John C. Paolillo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Text Technology/Applied Comp. Ling., Bielefeld University, Universitätsstrasse 25, Bielefeld, 33615, Germany

    Alexander Mehler

  2. LS2 9JT Leeds, United Kingdom

    Serge Sharoff

  3. Varvsgatan 25, Stockholm, 117 29, Sweden

    Marina Santini

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Paolillo, J.C., Warren, J., Kunz, B. (2010). Genre Emergence in Amateur Flash. In: Mehler, A., Sharoff, S., Santini, M. (eds) Genres on the Web. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 42. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9178-9_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9178-9_13

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  • Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9178-9

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