Genre analysis of bookmarked webpages
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011099423 |
| Pages | 954-971 |
| Date | 30 November 2010 |
| Published date | 30 November 2010 |
| Author | Michela Montesi |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Genre analysis of bookmarked
webpages
Michela Montesi
Faculty of Information Science, Complutense University of Madrid,
Madrid, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – A total of 17 user-compiled collections of webpages, comprising 833 bookmarked links in
terms of genre, are studied. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether users tend to bookmark
certain web genres more than others. Genre theory helps to make sense of the different pages included
in these collections, and to classify them, according to their communicative purpose and salient
non-topical features, into blogs, search interfaces, articles, tutorials.
Design/methodology/approach – A total of 17 participants took part in the research by providing
their collections of bookmark links. They were also interviewed about the reasons for bookmarking
and to comment on their collections. Relying on the interview results and on the previous literature, the
bookmarks were classified into four super-genres: main or access pages, transactional pages,
navigational pages, and content pages.
Findings – The results of the classification into web genres revealed a clear tendency to bookmark
main pages, such as homepages, which accounted for 42 per cent of all bookmarked web links.
Moreover, some aspects of relevance were highlighted such as the connections to use, time, and
context, as well as to the main web activity (browsing or searching).
Originality/value – Previously, bookmarks have mostly been studied as tools for information reuse,
but very rarely as sources of implicit relevance feedback. In addition, from the point of view of genre
theory, this research shows the importance of relating web genres to users’ intentions behind queries.
Keywords Worldwide web, Information retrieval
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Relevance is a fundamental notion in Information Science. Whereas cataloguing and
classification are concerned with aboutness, relevance is a central principle of
searching and thus of information retrieval (IR) (Saracevic, 2007b). Though the concept
is intuitive, its implementation in working IR systems is a challenging research topic
for information science, especially when it comes to searching the web. As relevance is
a contextual phenomenon which is meaningful for a certain searcher, information need
and task, a considerable amount of research into relevance deals with searchers or
information system users, and with how their feedback might improve IR systems,
either explicitly or implicitly. Kelly and Teevan (2003) review research into what is
called “implicit relevance feedback techniques” for expansion of web queries, i.e.
techniques that “unobtrusively obtain information about users by watching their
natural interactions with the system” (Kelly and Teevan, 2003, p. 18). The time spent
reading a webpage, or actions such as clicking, printing, saving, or selecting, all convey
implicit feedback about user relevance judgements. Implicit feedback data cannot be
considered as reliable as data collected with explicit feedback techniques, when the
user specifically indicates whether an item is relevant or not, and to what exte nt.
However implicit data can be gathered easily, in large amounts, and with no hassle for
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OIR
34,6
954
Refereed article received
15 July 2009
Approved for publication
18 April 2010
Online Information Review
Vol. 34 No. 6, 2010
pp. 954-971
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684521011099423
the user (Jung et al., 2006). Research into explicit relevance feedback, conversely,
pretends to define the criteria users employ to make relevance decisions, in order to
come up with a set of more or less generalisable criteria useful for improving IR
systems. Major results show that a wide range of criteria are used to select relevant
documents on the web, though topicality seems to be the most common. A certain
degree of agreement exists between different studies on the relevance criteria most
often relied on, but it has been proven that their relative importance changes according
to the circumstances. Kim and Oh (2009) for example found that the socia l dimension of
a Q&A site has an impact on the relevance criteria adopted in this environment.
Crystal and Greenberg (2006), studying the behaviour of health information seekers,
conclude that relevance judgements are complex and multifaceted and, among other
things, change depending on whether the user looks at the full text document or at a
surrogate. More importantly they state that relevance criteria, being closely tied to
users’ situations and information needs, are potentially numerous.
Bookmarking is included among the various manifestations of implicit relevance
feedback: by bookmarking a web document, users are assumed to indicate that it
responds, in total or in part, to a specific contextual information need. Nonetheless
bookmarking has been studied very little in comparison with other sources of implicit
relevance feedback, and more often as a strategy for information reuse than as an
implicit recognition of relevance. From the perspective of information reuse, bookmark
files are defined as “personal web informationspaces” (Abrams et al., 1998), that,
among the various methods for re-use (such as the browser history or sending emails to
oneself), seem to score poorly in portability, number of access points, and ability to
work as reminders (Jones et al., 2001). From t he point of view of relevance,
bookmarking is an intentional action bound to a specific search and context, an d thus
potentially revealing of the reasons that lead to establishing relevance. In this research
paper, bookmarks are studied as sources of implicit relevance feedback. The way we
look at them is different from the type of analysis normally carried out when studying
implicit relevance feedback, as in this case we are comparing saved/bookmarked items
with other items within a collection of relevant web pages. In order to do so, we analyse
bookmarks from the perspective of genre theory, looking for genre regularities in the
web documents bookmarked during search.
Genre theory is the background of research conducted in several differentdisciplines,
including discourse studies, computational linguistics, organisational studies,
information science, and information retrieval. Tho ugh they pursue different
objectives, they all share a common theoretical background, i.e. the idea of genres as
typified rhetorical actions occurring in recurrent situations (Miller, 1984). The concept
was initially conceived of in literary and discourse studies, Bakhtin’s (1986) essay on
speech genres probably being one of most influential formulations. More recently genre
has become a widelystudied subject in different branchesof discourse studies, including
applied linguistics (Swales, 1990) and computational linguistics (Biber, 1989). In the
social sciences its popularity has risen after its application to narratives and
communication patterns within organisations (Yates and Orlikowski, 1992). The
potential of genreto describe and classify discourse is probablyone of its most attractive
features, the other being its ability to capture the contextual elements of the
communicative actions it conveys. Different contexts ask for different genres, just as
preparing food requires a recipe, and even when the same document type is used in
different contexts, its purpose and generic nature may change. Østerlund (2006) shows
how a patient’s flowsheet changes its functionup to six times in the context of a hospital,
Genre analysis
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