Document

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Document

For other uses, see Document (disambiguation).

For technical reasons, several Pg. 99 albums redirect here. For these albums, see Document 5,
Document 7, Document 8 and Document 12.
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Several common types of documents: a birth certificate, business reports, a legal document (a re
statement
A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often
[1]

the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the
Latin Documentum, which denotes a "teaching" or "lesson": the verb doceō denotes "to teach".
In the past, the word was usually used to denote written proof useful as evidence of a truth or
fact. In the computer age, "document" usually denotes a primarily textual computer file,
including its structure and format, e.g. fonts, colors, and images. Contemporarily, "document" is
not defined by its transmission medium, e.g., paper, given the existence of electronic
documents. "Documentation" is distinct because it has more denotations than "document".
Documents are also distinguished from "realia", which are three-dimensional objects that
would otherwise satisfy the definition of "document" because they memorialize or represent
thought; documents are considered more as 2-dimensional representations. While documents
can have large varieties of customization, all documents can be shared freely and have the right
to do so, creativity can be represented by documents, also. History, events, examples, opinions,
etc. all can be expressed in documents.
Contents
• 1Abstract definitions
• 2Kinds
• 3Drafting
• 4Media
• 5In law
• 6See also
• 7References
• 8Further reading

Abstract definitions[edit]
The concept of "document" has been defined by Suzanne Briet as "any concrete or symbolic
indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether
physical or mental."[2]
An often-cited article concludes that "the evolving notion of document" among Jonathan Priest,
Otlet, Briet, Schürmeyer, and the other documentalists increasingly emphasized whatever
functioned as a document rather than traditional physical forms of documents. The shift to
digital technology would seem to make this distinction even more important. Levy's thoughtful
analyses have shown that an emphasis on the technology of digital documents has impeded our
understanding of digital documents as documents (e.g., Levy, 1994[3]). A conventional
document, such as a mail message or a technical report, exists physically in digital technology as
a string of bits, as does everything else in a digital environment. As an object of study, it has
been made into a document. It has become physical evidence by those who study it.
"Document" is defined in library and information science and documentation science as a
fundamental, abstract idea: the word denotes everything that may be represented or
memorialized to serve as evidence. The classic example provided by Suzanne Briet is an
antelope: "An antelope running wild on the plains of Africa should not be considered a
document[;] she rules. But if it were to be captured, taken to a zoo and made an object of
study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence being used by those
who study it. Indeed, scholarly articles written about the antelope are secondary documents,
since the antelope itself is the primary document."[1] [4] This opinion has been interpreted as an
early expression of actor–network theory.
Kinds[edit]
A document can be structured, like tabular documents, lists, forms, or scientific chart, semi-
structured like a book or a newspaper article, or unstructured like a handwritten note.
Documents are sometimes classified as secret, private, or public. They may also be described as
drafts or proofs. When a document is copied, the source is denominated the "original".
Documents are used in numerous fields, e.g.:
• Academia: manuscript, thesis, paper, journal, chart, and technical drawing
 • Media: mock-up, script, image, photography, and newspaper article
• Administration, law, and politics: application, brief, certificate, commission,
constitutional document, form, gazette, identity document, license, manifesto,
summons, census, and white paper
• Business: invoice, quote, RFP, proposal, contract, packing slip, manifest, report (detailed
and summary), spread sheet, MSDS, waybill, bill of lading (BOL), financial statement,
nondisclosure agreement (NDA), mutual nondisclosure agreement (MNDA), and user
guide
• Geography and planning: topographic map, cadastre, legend, and architectural plan
Such standard documents can be drafted based on a template.
Drafting[edit]
The page layout of a document is how information is graphically arranged in the space of the
document, e.g., on a page. If the appearance of the document is of concern, the page layout is
generally the responsibility of a graphic designer. Typography concerns the design of letter and
symbol forms and their physical arrangement in the document (see typesetting). Information
design concerns the effective communication of information, especially in industrial documents
and public signs. Simple textual documents may not require visual design and may be drafted
only by an author, clerk, or transcriber. Forms may require a visual design for their initial fields,
but not to complete the forms.
Media[edit]

A page of a birth register for Jews from 1859

Traditionally, the medium of a document was paper and the information was applied to it in
ink, either by handwriting (to make a manuscript) or by a mechanical process (e.g., a printing
press or laser printer). Today, some short documents also may consist of sheets of paper
stapled together.
Historically, documents were inscribed with ink on papyrus (starting in ancient Egypt) or
parchment; scratched as runes or carved on stone using a sharp tool, e.g., the Tablets of Stone
described in the Bible; stamped or incised in clay and then baked to make clay tablets, e.g., in
the Sumerian and other Mesopotamian civilizations. The papyrus or parchment was often
rolled into a scroll or cut into sheets and bound into a codex (book).

Contemporary electronic means of memorializing and displaying documents include:

• Monitor of a desktop computer, laptop, tablet PC, et cetera; optionally with a printer to
produce a hard copy;
• Personal digital assistant (PDA);
• Dedicated e-book device;
• Electronic paper, typically, using the Portable Document Format (PDF);
• Information appliance;
• Digital audio player; and
• Radio and television service provider.

Digital documents usually require a specific file format to be presentable in a specific medium.
See also Schöpfel et al. (2020) about data documents [5]
In law[edit]
Documents in all forms frequently serve as material evidence in criminal and civil proceedings.
The forensic analysis of such a document is within the scope of questioned document
examination. To catalog and manage the large number of documents that may be produced
during litigation, Bates numbering is often applied to all documents in the lawsuit so that each
document has a unique, arbitrary, identification number.

See also[edit]
• Archive
• Book
• Documentation
• History of the book
• Identity document
• Letterhead
• Realia (library science)
• Travel document

References[edit]
1. ^ Jump up to:a b Buckland, M. "What Is a Digital Document?" 1998. In Document Numérique Paris. 2(2). [1] Archived
2011-10-02 at the Wayback Machine.
2. ^ Briet. 1951. 7. Quoted in Buckland, 1991.
 3. ^ Levy, D. M. "Fixed or Fluid? Document Stability and New Media." 1994. In European Conference on Hypertext
Technology 1994 Proceedings, pp. 24–31. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 18 October
2011 from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.119.8813&rep=rep1&type=pdf Archived 2013-
06-06 at the Wayback Machine
4. ^ Buckland, Michael. 2018. “Document theory”. Knowledge Organization 45, no. 5: 425-436. Also available in ISKO
Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization, ed. Birger Hjørland, coed. Claudio Gnoli,
http://www.isko.org/cyclo/document
5. ^ Schöpfel, Joachim, Dominic Farace, Hélène Prost, Antonella Zane and Birger Hjørland. 2020. "Data Documents". In
ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization, eds. Birger Hjørland and Claudio Gnoli. Available at:
https://www.isko.org/cyclo/data_documents

Further reading[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Documents.

• Briet, S. (1951). Qu'est-ce que la documentation? Paris: Documentaires Industrielles et Techniques.

• Buckland, M. (1991). Information and information systems. New York: Greenwood Press.
• Frohmann, Bernd (2009). Revisiting "what is a document?", Journal of Documentation, 65(2), 291–303.
• Hjerppe, R. (1994). A framework for the description of generalized documents. Advances in Knowledge Organization,
4, 173–180.
• Houser, L. (1986). Documents: The domain of library and information science. Library and Information Science
Research, 8, 163–188.
• Larsen, P.S. (1999). Books and bytes: Preserving documents for posterity. Journal of the American Society for
Information Science, 50(11), 1020–1027.
• Lund, N. W. (2008). Document theory. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43, 399–432.
• Riles, A. (Ed.) (2006). Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
• Schamber, L. (1996). What is a document? Rethinking the concept in uneasy times. Journal of the American Society
for Information Science, 47, 669–671.
• Signer, Beat: What is Wrong with Digital Documents? A Conceptual Model for Structural Cross-Media Content
Composition and Reuse, In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2010),
Vancouver, Canada, November 2010.
• Smith, Barry. “How to Do Things with Documents”, Rivista di Estetica, 50 (2012), 179–198.
• Smith, Barry. “Document Acts”, in Anita Konzelmann-Ziv, Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), 2013. Institutions, Emotions,
and Group Agents.Contributions to Social Ontology (Philosophical Studies Series), Dordrecht: Springer
• Ørom, A. (2007). The concept of information versus the concept of a document. I: Document (re)turn. Contributions
from a research field in transition. Ed. By Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund & Andreas Vårheim. Frankfurt is Main:
Peter Lang. (pp. 53–72).

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