Genres of digital documents

There has recently been an upsurge of interest in document genres - the fusion of form and function that makes a document instantly recognizable to its community of users. The utility of genre identification is now accepted as a premise, but many interesting and challenging questions remain. The papers assembled here create a truly interdisciplinary body of work, drawing on literary and communication theories, library and information science, natural language processing, writing, and machine learning, among others. One of the most challenging aspects of research in genre is to create a rigorous yet flexible way of representing document genres that will reflect their form and properties, as well as their communicative role as embedded in a particular community of discourse.