This media linguistic study provides a genre history of the personal weblog, using a diachronic corpus (1997–2012). The results on several dimensions (e.g. situation, structure etc.) are used to outline a coherent genre history of the personal weblog in its various relations to different on- and offline genres.

Peter Schildhauer studied (German/English) at the universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Newcastle (UK). His research interests lie in the fields of text- and media-linguistics, computer-mediated communication and digital education. He works as a lecturer at the German department of the University of Halle-Wittenberg and is co-founder of the ejournal .

« [...] is an excellent reading on (corpus-based) genre analysis and more specifically on the diachronic analysis of blogs. It is a recommended reading for linguists and computational linguists interested in genre analysis and in the genre-revealing linguistic features.» (Marina Santini, Linguist List Jan. 2017)

Contents: Genre dynamics – Genre change – Patterns of genre change – Inivisible Hand theory – A diachronic blog corpus – Blog communication form – Communicative situation – Language and image on personal weblogs – Posting genres and genre profile of the personal weblog – A genre history – Genre migration – Genre split – Pattern embedding.