PB1B

PB1B: Inspecting Genre Generators

Computer Science papers are very formal and scholarly. They are probably used to share knowledge and research among other professionals in this field, and thus they must convey it in an official manner to add to their credibility. Since many professionals can collaborate in research, credit is given to all those authors at the top of the page. The Title is clear and informative, placed at the top of the page. These papers are obviously meant for highly educated people, and targeted mostly to other professionals in this field. This being said, these papers all use an “abstract” to introduce the topic. An “abstract” is like a short summary of the whole paper; an overview for the reader. The abstract is followed by a table of contents, an introduction, and numbered following topics. The information is neatly organized, as a formal paper probably should be. This allows the reader to easily see the topics being discussed, and further more allows the authors to communicate the information effectively. Computer science papers also include graphs and other figures. These are numbered and are followed by a short description of the figure underneath it. These figures allow the reader to further support their data pertaining to their research. The numbering allows them to easily refer to it in their paper. Lastly, the research paper has citations referring to references they made in their research paper. The references are then listed at the end of the paper. This is typical of a research paper, and pretty much mandatory if the authors want to avoid plagiarism in the academic field.

The comic strip generator showed that comic strips are targeted towards a much broader audience. The audience does not have to be above average intelligence to understand comics. Even so, comics can be crude and may not be suitable to a younger audience. The comic strips are mainly illustrations, contained in separated boxes. The illustrations aren’t too detailed, yet they are colorful, and contain two people sharing a dialogue. The dialogue isn’t too long, and is contained in white speech bubbles. The main purpose of a comic strip is to be comical of course; to make the reader laugh. Therefore they are usually pretty short, and serve to throw a punchline. They are straight to the point. Comic strips don’t tell a detailed story, but instead present a brief humorous situation.

The meme generator was particularly amusing because memes have recently become quite popular.  Memes are targeted at a large audience of internet users. Personally, I’ve seen a six year old and a fifty five year old laugh at the same meme. To understand a meme, however, I think the viewer has to understand the reference it is making. As I scrolled through the memes I noticed they usually used references to popular TV shows, pop culture, or a picture that had gained internet fame. So although memes can have a large audience, they can vary in who might actually understand them due to the reference. The memes were all a large picture in a square. Another common feature was that some meme’s had a similar background: alternating triangles in different colors. The main goal of a meme is to be funny or amusing. The text used to do this is usually white in a large font, often at the top and bottom of the picture. There are also reoccurring phrases such as “what if I told you” or “ not sure if”. What is also interesting is that memes can use the same picture to make a different joke each time, but they will still follow the same structure.

In studying these websites we can see that generators outline the main conventions of whatever they are generating. This makes it clear what is staying the same in a particular genre. Thus we can see the “skeleton” of a genre and further understand why it has those conventions. Using a generator allows us to easily identify these elements in order to classify genres.