Parodies as exemplars of genres

[Richard]

For those of you who attended the most recent Discourse Analysis cluster, Ajarn Jan and I presented an idea about how parodies might be representative of genres. We suggested 2 research focuses:
1. Using a parody text to identify genre features
2. Distinguishing genuine examples of a genre from a parody text
Jan is working on the second topic looking at how April Fool's news stories differ from genuine ones. I tried out the first one. Using the Multidimensional Analysis Tagger which has 8 genres pre-installed, I found some parodies of one of these (Press reports) by copying some stories from the sadly lamented Notthenation website and ran them through the program. For Biber's 6 register dimensions, the parody texts fell within the range of values applicable to press reports on all dimensions. However, the pre-installed genre closest to the parody news stories for each dimension is:
Involved v. Informational: Academic prose
Narrative: General fiction
Explicitness: Academic prose
Persuasion: Personal letters
Abstractness: Press reports
Elaboration: Official documents

Overall then, the parody texts are not great exemplars of the genre of press reports. The idea, then, doesn't seem to work.

Just thought I'd share this as an example of one of many research projects that I start but don't finish.