A shift in tool

            When Netty and I first started to plan our research tool, it did not much resemble what we eventually decided upon. And I think unpacking why we’ve made a shift from one idea to the next might tell us something about genre theory—in particular, how we might use a framework of genre for analysis or how to research genre.

            In our initial plans, we had the idea to generate a visual map for users to see how a text is networked with antecedent texts—users would be able to find a text or a genre and trace it historically or to look at other texts/genres that are in parallel to the text in question.  This research tool would be more of an archive of texts that are represented in a visual way. The artifacts within the genre would be arranged visually where similar artifacts would be in closer proximity to the artifact, but also clusters of texts would denote a specific genre. This idea we borrowed from this website: http://www.music-map.com/ At this website, you can search a music group and the interface places the band at the center. Other bands circle around the band of focus—the closer a group is to the center, the more similar it is in genre, but interestingly, depending on where the other band is in terms of direction demonstrates it’s closer proximity to a different genre. So, we see how the band at the center may be operating within several genres.

            When we designed this initial tool, our main focus was on how a user might use a framework of genre to research a specific artifact: the map would be an archive that was tagged for the genre. The visual map could also tell us something about how a large genre (we were thinking like letters or even documents generally) has been organized into sub-genres. But then once we had this idea, we began to discuss whether this tool was in fact a research tool for genre specifically or was it just representing genres? We saw that this archive is more geared toward genre as an aspect of many other theories: users could use the archive to look at genres but we could not figure a way to fit the genre theorists of this week’s readings into the tool. And we saw this as a problem if we were also trying to map genre as a theory, not just as an aspect.

            So, we began to move toward a set of Frequently Asked Questions—I won’t go too far into how the FAQ operates because we describe it here . Specifically, we would get the best of both worlds: first, we could include the voices of people who were specifically theorizing genre. And second, we could include other archives or tools that imply a genre theory, but we could offer users a frame to understand the tool through theorist of genre. For example, the music map mentioned above is provided under “how do genres emerge?” That question coupled with the brief description of the tool may prompt users to see the map as contributing the questions of genre, specifically.