Tuesday, January 12, 2016

PB1B

With internet developing, there is everything that we need through Internet. There are also many kinds of genres generator in the Internet such as faked academic essay, random comic pictures and humorous memes.
First, let us go to the website SCIgen (pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen). When we open this website, it asks to put in several authors’ name. Then, we just click the “generator” bottom, it provides a complex website which is full of words. Specifically, the content will change with the changing of authors’ name. And it provides totally different title with changing of authors’ name or even changing the order of authors’ name, such as “deconstructing semaphore”, “Decoupling Von Neumann Machines from SMPs in Forward-Error Correction”, and “Investigating Write-Back Caches and Write-Ahead Logging Using Yernut.” Actually, I am confused about the title. What is the title talks about? However, if we look carefully, we can find there are still some common features such as Introduction, Related Work, Model, Evaluation, Experiment and conclusion, with authors’ name changing. In the beginning of article, it is “abstract.” There is several sentence in this part. It always talks about a topic, then people have different opinion about such topic. After it gives out the debate topic, it comes to second part. In the beginning of second part, the article firstly produce the introduction of the background for the debate. It will give readers more background information about the topic and make readers have deeper understanding about the topic. Then, it gives out several official step to illustrate or prove the topic. For example, it has related work that shows what they have done to proof the topic, model, Evaluation, experiment and conclusion. Experiment and the data got from experiment are the most persuasive method to proof the topic. And the conclusion is the result that come from those steps prove and the whole process is for getting such a conclusion. It seems like a very official and persuasive essay for discussing an academic topic. However, I have to say the whole essay is not actually true including the experiment and data.
Then, let us see the comic website (Comic strips: pandyland.net/random). Comparing this website and the first one, it seems much simpler and easier to read or understand than the essay does. It is also not hard to common features through different comics. There are three comic pictures once we can see after click “generate”, and there are two man in the picture, a brown hair man and a yellow hair man who named Simon. What’s more, in most pictures, there will be a sentence said by one of them. The order of the comic is random, and sometimes it is hard to find closed connection between continuous pictures. However, such disorder comic causes the dialog disordered, sometimes exactly can make readers to laugh.
Finally, let us see the last website (http://memegenerator.net/). Through this website, we can find a lot of hot images which are very popular nowadays including comic characteristics, normal citizens and famous people. There also are many common features when we compare all of these images. The most obvious feature is that all images are including a main characteristics and several short phrase. And the phrase are exactly can fit with the situation which appears in the picture. When we combine the picture and the phrase, we will laugh out loud. In addition, we also can use the pictures but write our own interesting jokes on the pictures. If we change the phrase, we can see the same picture that with different phrase will have largely different meaning but also humorous.
Except these three website, I also search another joke generator website through google -- randomjokegenerator.com. It is a website that generate random jokes. The common feature of the page is that the joke is not very long (if the joke is very long, most readers are not patient to finish reading it) but indeed humorous when readers fully understand the meaning of the context.

Through these different topic website, I find there are genres everywhere even in the joke generator.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Xudong, I find a very interesting point in your analysis of SCIgen that the content of a fake research paper changes with the changing of author's name. I don't know if that is true but I believe that it is worth proving. I agree with your opinion that conventions actually help reader become less confused about the kind of text genres, and be more clear about what the text is talking about. By the way, I love your own joke generator as I find a lot of joke worth reading and laughing.

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  2. I was impressed by how thoroughly you describe the process of exploring genre generators and finding out conventions of each genre. I am in total agreement with these conventions you have already pointed out. For instance, you state that each computer science research paper includes "Introduction, Related Work, Model, Evaluation, Experiment and Conclusion". Yes, it is very true-except that Reference, in my opinion, is also an feature as critical as ones mentioned above. However, I think, the content of your blog can be more solid and persuasive if you discuss more about why there are these conventions because analyzing logics behind each convention can really help us understand what are genres at their heart.

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