Genre as interface metaphor: exploiting form and function in digital environments

Examining Variations of Prominent Features in Genre Classification

“…The notion of shape they introduce relates more to the visualisation of conceptual elements such as breadth of argument. The notion of form discussed by Toms and Campbell ( [23]) is closer to the layout that we are trying to capture. However, while they concentrate on structural properties such as title, sections and bibliography, we are interested in the topology of the entire page.…”

Looking for genre

“…Secondly, the participants constructed or "loaded a set of expectations" which were founded on the available visual clues in the texts. They argued that perception is a top-down process, in contrast to the ecological, bottom-up, where the readers recognize the genres through the attributes of the layout which forms the basis of document recognition (or perception for recognition), and although Toms and Campbell, like Lakoff [11], refer to the bottom-up process and suggest that genres may "act as a single gestalt" [17] they do not explore other possibilities, such as, perception for action and how a genre is perceived when the document is displayed to a reader (in all fairness, it should be pointed out that Watt [19] also fails to explore the perception for recognition concept). In their conclusions, however, Toms and Campbell [17] query how the form of the document affects a reader in the first few seconds of the interaction and this begs the question: how do the form features of a genre aid in text interpretation and use?…”

“…Toms & Campbell [18] suggests that genre is viewed as a shape representing an interface metaphor, in which case the visual cues enable a framework to be loaded (possibly like those frames described by [5; 13]). On the other hand, in their study, Toms and Campbell [17] leaned towards the constructivist (perception for recognition) process, since they aimed to contrast the content (function) and form in order to discover whether readers can perceive and process form on its own or need semantic content to identify it. They also aimed to question whether participants used their previous knowledge to identify a text, such as a web page, or used another technique.…”

“…They suggest that function (content) is scanned for repetitive patterns (arguably going by the authors' description it could also have been skimmed) and form is possibly scanned for dominant patterns so that possibly two processes are actually on going at the same time. Function (content) provides semantic hints which demonstrate the purpose of the genres, whereas when the document structure was shown, Toms & Campbell [17] stated that: "participants had to match their sensory response with the corresponding representation stored in long-term memory". They also claimed, first of all, that in order to identify a document using form, the reader scans and translates some or all of the visual cues present at the same time to locate the semantic clues.…”

“…They also aimed to question whether participants used their previous knowledge to identify a text, such as a web page, or used another technique. Toms and Campbell [17] contended that the 'attributes' of a document's genre enable it to be specifically identified and showed that genre features play a significant role in recognizing documents. They performed experiments using form and function (content), exposing participants, with backgrounds in information technology and an academic environment, to digital and hard copies of Web documents.…”