Abstract
This study pursues two related aims: (1) It develops a diachronic approach to web-based genres and explores its potentials and limitations. (2) As a case in point, it uses the genre personal weblog, providing a diachronic description of both recurrent and changing features of the genre. It applies a mixed-methods approach that draws on historical sources and the DIABLOC, a diachronic blog corpus, which spans 15 years from 1997 to 2012 and includes also examples of the very first weblogs. Analyses are selectively extended beyond the surface of blog-pages to their HTML source code. On the basis of corpus material, patterns of genre change such as migration, pattern embedding and genre split are described and embedded into a differentiated model of the development of the personal weblog genre.
Highlights
Genre research on the World Wide Web has been compared to the adventure of riding “rough waves” (Santini/Mehler/Sharoff 2011: 9)
These deliberations lead to the following general research question: What are the possible benefits and limitations of a diachronic approach to web-based genres as defined here?. Possible answers to this question are explored using the example of the personal weblog. Concerning this genre, the paper pursues the following questions: 1. What genre features of the personal weblog can be considered recurrent and stable, and what features have changed over time?
I pursued a set of related research questions concerning the personal weblog
Summary
Genre research on the World Wide Web has been compared to the adventure of riding “rough waves” (Santini/Mehler/Sharoff 2011: 9). Studies in Giltrow/Stein (2009b) stress the stability of web-based genres and some even accentuate transmedial continuities, for instance with regard to online diaries (McNeill 2009) and genres of digital folklore (Heyd 2009). These studies illustrate the potentials of a shift in perspective from synchronic to diachronic genre research in order to perceive the stability of recurrence under the fluid surface of the WWW’s “rough waves”. This cognitive aspect of genres, i. e. the underlying knowledge that allows users to recognise, classify and produce texts of a certain genre, can be reconstructed from actual occurrences
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