Wednesday, January 13, 2016

PB1b

Casandra Phillips
01/13/2016
PB1b
PB1B: Inspecting Genre Generators
SCIgen: pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen:
The more I read into the SCIgen program the more confused and bored I got. It sounded exactly like a
Scientific study and research paper with the same structures and conventions. It starts off with the introduction that presents us with the theory and analysis of the entire paper. Then it moves onto presenting the hypothesis with background information on what the entire scientific paper is about, with this follows the related work and presents the models made to represent this work following with the results and conclusion of your work. Although this paper is entirely fake and confusing because it is all bs, it still looks and sounds like a professional scientist wrote it and this is all an actual scientific study. It uses all these intellectual words that I can’t even pronounce, graphs, bars, tables, etc. which allows the reader to feel like what is written is actually a legitimate paper.
I think that what is happening in this website helps us better understand how the genre of scientific articles or research papers work. It shows the audience the specific structure and conventions it must have to be a “good” research paper.
Comic strips: pandyland.net/random:
I think that these comic strips were the best conventions to focus on out of all the four websites we got to look into. I think that they were very comical, blunt and real. I think that someone must have background knowledge about what the comic strip / meme is about before they can really understand the sarcasm it has in it or the joke it is trying to point out. There are a few that I found kind of inappropriate as well but that is what made them hilarious because they were so true! This reminded me of an assignment I went over for the PB1A. In the blog we gave for PB1a there was a classmate named Edwin that wrote about comic strips and he brought up the very important point that we must know the background history of the joke before actually understanding it. Therefore, there are a few comic strips that caught my eyes because they proved exactly what my point is about the background and understanding everything.
Some of the memes I found hilarious were; the pregnancy one about the lady telling her husband that she feels sick of him and she does not know whether it is him or his baby he is caring, the Kermit “none of my business” one and the racist Muslim one because it just shows how stupid are about other cultures and people. Again, I think that what is happening in this website with these comic strips and memes help us better understand the genre of comedy writing pieces and how they should be structured.
Memes: memegenerator.net:
I have never been much of the person who actually created any memes, instead I am just the person who people send them to and I laugh my ass off because they are so stupid. However, I did not find these memes very amusing. I think that for the most part they were kind of old and I did not recognize much of the background on them so I did not understand the joke. The conventions for memes were all there though, they all had a very famous/ popular picture and straight forward, short text.

I found various genre generators on google once I knew what a good website for this project would look like and I was very surprised with what I found. I never really thought stuff like this existed so running into so many websites was kind of trippy. One website I looked into particularly was the song lyric generator. I think that this website shows us the conventions these genres of music have individually and what makes them so different. As a song in general they all must have a chorus and various versus, but each genre within has its own conventions. I compared break-up songs to love songs through this website and my findings were just really interesting. In the break-up songs no matter what story I wrote there was always a line in there that said they were ready to move on and they did not need this person anymore. On the other hand, the love song spoke all about how much they would never want to be without the person. I then looked into real songs after this and I found that a break-up song (Miley Cyrus: The Climb) spoke about her moving on without this person because she did not need him anymore. This just shows us how conventions for this genre are very strict yet can be said in many different ways.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Cassandra, to begin, your PB1b looks very organized overall. In the first part, you addressed the conventions of a fake scientific paper. " It uses all these intellectual words that I can’t even pronounce, graphs, bars, tables, etc. which allows the reader to feel like what is written is actually a legitimate paper." This sentence concludes the features of a paper very well. As for comic strips and memes, you pointed out a very interesting fact that readers must know the background history before understanding jokes and sarcasm, and you gave several examples. Finally, the song lyric generator you found sounds very creative and helpful in learning genres.

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  2. Hi!
    I thought that you did a really great job analyzing the conventions of each genre. I could really relate to your comments about the science one because I too could not get past how boring and awkward they were! I also agreed with your thought that the comics were the best to look at in terms of the conventions. I think that they really helped us understand what the assignment was so appreciated your insight on that! Overall I thought that you did a really great job with your insight!

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  3. Hi!
    I thought that you did a really great job analyzing the conventions of each genre. I could really relate to your comments about the science one because I too could not get past how boring and awkward they were! I also agreed with your thought that the comics were the best to look at in terms of the conventions. I think that they really helped us understand what the assignment was so appreciated your insight on that! Overall I thought that you did a really great job with your insight!

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  5. Cassy,
    I think you had a very sound analysis of all of the genre generators, and you were able to point out all of the key conventions in each generator. I appreciated how you were able to relate the topics of this PB to a classmate’s previous PB to show how you really read his paper and took the time to comprehend it. It was a good idea to explain why you didn’t like some of the memes that you saw. I also saw memes with uncommon backgrounds and it is surprising how much difference the image makes in the way the joke comes across. Good job on the PB!
    Bronwyn

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  6. Very creative and well organized! Listing the title of each type of genre generator in bold made it an easy read. I agree that the SCI scientific research papers were boring to read. Great analysis on it though, as you mentioned many details from the table of contents and that it sounded very intellectual, although it was fake. I also agree with you that the comic strips were comical, and the meme generator was lacking a sense of comedy – although most memes I see online are hilarious. Good job on linking the conventions to each genre. All of these genre generator websites are pretty cool, the song lyric generator especially.

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