[Air-l] Hello and is there a definition of 'personal home pages'?

[elijah wright]

> I've been lurking on the list a while but have come forward because I am 
> finding it difficult to do something which seemed at first relatively 
> un-problematic - determining what counts as a personal home page. 
> Wherever I draw the line there seem to be sites that fall just outside 
> it that might fit. Is there a commonly-understood definition?


See "Genres and the Web: Is the personal home page the first uniquely 
digital genre?" by Andrew Dillon and Barbara Gushrowski.  Available at 
www.ischool.utexas.edu/ ~adillon/publications/genres_web.pdf

and also available as:

Dillon, A., & Gushrowski, B. A. (2000). Genres and the Web: Is the 
Personal Home Page the First Uniquely Digital Genre? Journal of the 
American Society for Information Science, 51(2), 202-205.

Also see "Personal Home Pages on the Web: A Review of Research" by Nicola 
Döring - available in JCMC at 
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol7/issue3/doering.html

You might also try this one:

Bauman, M. L. (1999). The Evolution of Internet Genres. Computers and 
Composition, 16(2), 269-282.

or this one:

Yates, J., & Orlikowski, W. (1992). Genres of Organizational 
Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying Communication and 
Media. Academy of Management Review, 17(2), 299-326.

You might also check out week 4 of Susan Herring's syllabus for her 
Content Analysis for the Web course, available at:

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/web.syll.04.html

If you slog through all of this you will have a pretty good grip on 
personal home pages and 'net genre theory in general...


--elijah