6/28/2020 Document - Wikipedia
Document
A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized
Several common types of
representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-
fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from documents: a birth certificate, a
the Latin Documentum, which denotes a "teaching" or "lesson": legal document (a restraining order),
the verb doceō denotes "to teach". In the past, the word was and a bank statement
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
Abstract definitions
Kinds
Drafting
Birth story
In law
See also
References
Further reading
Abstract definitions
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."[1]
The document had the right to change within 5 days on the date of registration
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[2]). 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.
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6/28/2020 Document - Wikipedia
"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."[3] This
opinion has been interpreted as an early expression of actor–network theory.
Kinds
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".
Standards are accepted for specific applications in various fields, e.g.:
Academia: manuscript, thesis, paper, and journal
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
Government, law, and politics: application, brief, certificate, commission, constitutional document,
form, gazette, identity document, license, manifesto, summons, and white paper
Media: mock-up and script
Such standard documents can be drafted based on a template.
Drafting
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.
Birth story
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;
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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.
In law
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
A page of a birth register for Jews
documents that may be produced during litigation, Bates from 1859
numbering is often applied to all documents in the lawsuit so that
each document has a unique, arbitrary, identification number.
See also
Archive
Book
Documentation
History of the book
Identity document
Letterhead
Realia (library science)
Travel document
References
1. Briet. 1951. 7. Quoted in Buckland, 1991.
2. 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 [Link]
doi=[Link].8813&rep=rep1&type=pdf Archived ([Link]
1/[Link] 2013-
06-06 at the Wayback Machine
3. Buckland, M. "What Is a Digital Document?" 1998. In Document Numérique Paris. 2(2). [1] (http://
[Link]/~buckland/[Link]) Archived ([Link]
002042527/[Link] 2011-10-02 at the Wayback
Machine.
Further reading
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.
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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 ([Link]
_Digital_Documents_A_Conceptual_Model_for_Structural_Cross-Media_Content_Composition_a
nd_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 ([Link]
[Link] Rivista di
Estetica, 50 (2012), 179-198.
Smith, Barry. “Document Acts ([Link]
[Link]/smith/articles/[Link])”, in Anita Konzelmann-Ziv, Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.),
2013. Institutions, Emotions, and Group [Link] 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).
Retrieved from "[Link]
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