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To introduce the special issue on “Genres of digital documents.” While there are many definitions of genre, most include consideration of the intended communicative purpose, form and sometimes expected content of a document. Most also include the notion of social acceptance, that a document is of a particular genre to the extent that it is recognized as such within a given discourse community.

The article reviews the notion of document genre and its applicability to studies of digital documents and introduces the four articles in the special issue.

Genre can be studied based on intrinsic genre attributes or on the extrinsic function that genre fulfills in human activities. Studies on intrinsic attributes include classifications of genres as clusters of attributes, though these classifications can be problematic because documents can be used in flexible ways. Also, new information technologies have enabled the appearance of novel genres. Studies on extrinsic function include ways to use genre for education or information accesses, as well as the use of genre as a lens for understanding communications in organizations. The four articles in the special issue illustrate these approaches.

The paper provides a framework that organizes the range of research about genres of digital documents that should be helpful to those reading this research or planning their own studies.

Purpose – To examine the evolution of the online newspaper genre in Scandinavia. To provide an understanding of the institutional context in which online newspapers initially were produced and modified over time. Design/methodology/approach – A longitudinal study of three different types of newspapers in three Scandinavian countries. The study is based on interviews with newspaper representatives conducted during recurring visits in 1996, 1999 and 2002, and web page analysis of their online newspapers. Findings – The study illustrates how online newspapers have established a number of communicative practices significant for recognizing them as a distinct digital genre, and it outlines a set of institutional factors shaping the ongoing change of these newspapers. In addition, the study demonstrates the emergence of sequential interdependencies between online and printed news. Originality/value – The focus on Scandinavian newspapers in this paper complements studies conducted in other parts of the world regarding online newspaper genre evolution.

The purpose of the study was to investigate and describe the way in which people organise documents in their offices. Eight university faculty members were asked to describe their own offices in terms of the organisation of documents. Each respondent was also asked to sort a typical day's mail. Following the data analysis, four of the eight respondents were interviewed again, at which time the researcher used the results of the analysis as a guide and tried to sort and classify each respondent's mail as he or she might have. An inductively created content analysis of the data was performed and the results suggest that the criteria or factors that people take into account when classifying documents consist not only of document factors (such as the document's topic or form) but also, to a very important degree, of situational factors (such as the use to which the document is to be put). In addition, it was shown that people are able to articulate the process by which classification decisions were made, and the data produced by this articulation lend themselves to analysis at a level which can yield genera! rules about the behaviour. One implication of this study is that, in designing systems for organising documents, it might be advantageous to explore ways of modelling typical contexts of document use, since these seem to be very important in classification decisions made within personal information environments.

The purpose of this paper is to account for the genre characteristics of non‐linear, multi‐modal, web‐mediated documents. It involves a two‐dimensional view on genres that allows one to account for the fact that digital genres act not only as text but also as medium.

The theoretical framework of the article is the Swalesian genre theory used in academic settings all over the world to investigate the relationship between discourse and social practice and to teach genre conventions to students of language and communication. Up till now most genre research has focused on the characteristics of “printed” texts, whereas less has been done to apply the genre theory to digital genres.

The article discusses the characteristics of digital genres, notably the media constraints that have a significant effect on the production and reception of digital genres and suggests an extension of the Swalesian genre model that takes the digital characteristics into account.

The suggestion for a revised genre model is not based on an extensive empirical study of various types of web sites. The observation is restricted to a limited number of commercial web sites.

The article proposes new insights into the concept of genre adapting traditional models of genre theory to web‐mediated texts. A revised two‐dimensional genre model incorporating media elements into the concept of genre thus takes account of the particular characteristics of the navigation and reading elements of web‐mediated genres.

To explain how genres structure temporal coordination in virtual teams over time.

The first year e‐mail archive of a small distributed software development start‐up was coded and analyzed and these primary data were complemented with interviews of the key participants and examination of notes from the weekly phone meetings.

In this paper, it is found that members of a small start‐up organization temporally coordinated their dispersed activities through everyday communicative practices, thus accomplishing both the distributed development of a software system and the creation of a robust virtual team. In particular, the LC members used three specific genres – status reports, bug/error notifications, and update notifications – and one genre system – phone meeting management – to coordinate their distributed software development over time.

The study confirms the various suggestions from prior virtual team research that structuring communication and work process is an important mechanism for the temporal coordination of dispersed activities. In particular, an attempt has been made to show that the notions of genre and genre system are particularly useful to make sense of and analyze how such structuring actually occurs over time.

In this paper, the research focus is shifted from how a given set of temporal coordination mechanisms affect team performance to how coordination mechanisms emerge, are stabilized, and adapted over time. It is also shown how the notion of genre may be used to shed light on the practices through which temporal coordination is accomplished in geographically distributed teams.

Aims to describe systematically the characteristics of weblogs (blogs) – frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence and which are the latest genre of internet communication to attain widespread popularity.

This paper presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of 203 randomly selected blogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of blogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects.

Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and underestimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self‐expression.

Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, considers the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situates it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the internet today, and suggests possible developments of the use of blogs over time in response to changes in user behavior, technology, and the broader ecology of internet genres.

This article is a contribution to the development of a comprehensive interdisciplinary theory of LIS in the hope of giving a more precise evaluation of its current problems. The article describes an interdisciplinary framework for lis, especially information retrieval (IR), in a way that goes beyond the cognitivist ‘information processing paradigm’. The main problem of this paradigm is that its concept of information and language does not deal in a systematic way with how social and cultural dynamics set the contexts that determine the meaning of those signs and words that are the basic tools for the organisation and retrieving of documents in LIS. The paradigm does not distinguish clearly enough between how the computer manipulates signs and how librarians work with meaning in practice when they design and run document mediating systems. The ‘cognitive viewpoint’ of Ingwersen and Belkin makes clear that information is not objective, but rather only potential, until it is interpreted by an individual mind with its own internal mental world view and purposes. It facilitates further study of the social pragmatic conditions for the interpretation of concepts. This approach is not yet fully developed. The domain analytic paradigm of Hjørland and Albrechtsen is a conceptual realisation of an important aspect of this area. In the present paper we make a further development of a non‐reductionistic and interdisciplinary view of information and human social communication by texts in the light of second‐order cybernetics, where information is seen as ‘a difference which makes a difference’ for a living autopoietic (self‐organised, self‐creating) system. Other key ideas are from the semiotics of Peirce and also Warner. This is the understanding of signs as a triadic relation between an object, a representation and an interpretant. Information is the interpretation of signs by living, feeling, self‐organising, biological, psychological and social systems. Signification is created and con‐trolled in a cybernetic way within social systems and is communicated through what Luhmann calls generalised media, such as science and art. The modern socio‐linguistic concept ‘discourse communities’ and Wittgenstein's ‘language game’ concept give a further pragmatic description of the self‐organising system's dynamic that determines the meaning of words in a social context. As Blair and Liebenau and Backhouse point out in their work it is these semantic fields of signification that are the true pragmatic tools of knowledge organ‐isation and document retrieval. Methodologically they are the first systems to be analysed when designing document mediating systems as they set the context for the meaning of concepts. Several practical and analytical methods from linguistics and the sociology of knowledge can be used in combination with standard methodology to reveal the significant language games behind document mediation.