A document (noun from latin Latin or sometimes Roman is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Although often considered a dead language, in view of the fact that it has no native speakers, a small number of scholars can fluently speak it and it continues to be taught in schools and universities and has been, and currently is, used in the process of documentum [second declension, gen In grammar, the genitive case is the case that marks a noun as modifying another noun. It often marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun but it can also indicate various relationships other than possession; certain verbs may take arguments in the genitive case; and it may have adverbial uses (see Adverbial genitive). Modern English does documentī]: lesson, instruction, warning), is a bounded physical or digital representation of a body of information Information, in its most restricted technical sense, is an ordered sequence of symbols. As a concept, however, information has many meanings. Moreover, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation designed with the capacity (and usually intent) to communicate Communication is a process whereby information is enclosed in a package and is channeled and imparted by a sender to a receiver via some medium. The receiver then decodes the message and gives the sender a feedback. All forms of communication require a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, however the receiver need not be present or aware. A document may manifest symbolic A symbol is something such as an object, picture, written word, sound, or particular mark that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On maps, crossed sabres may indicate a battlefield. Numerals are symbols for numbers . All language consists of symbols, diagrammatic or sensory-representational information. To document (verb) is to produce a document artifact by collecting and representing information. In prototypical usage, a document is understood as a paper artifact, containing information in the form of ink marks. Increasingly documents are also understood as digital artifacts.

Colloquial usage is revealed by the connotations and denotations that appear in a Web search for document. From these usages, one can infer the following typical connotations:

• Writing that provides information person's thinking by means of symbolic marks.
• A written account of ownership or obligation.
• To record in detail; "The parents documented every step of their child's development".
• A digital file in a particular format.
• To support or supply with references; "Can you document your claims?".
• An artifact that meets a legal notion of document for purposes of discovery in litigation.
• Document is the practical construct for describing matter Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects are made. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume. In practice however there is no single correct scientific meaning of "matter," as different fields use in different forms which retain information Information, in its most restricted technical sense, is an ordered sequence of symbols. As a concept, however, information has many meanings. Moreover, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation for a reasonable period of time wherein it can be perceived In philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. The word "perception" comes from the Latin words perceptio, percipio, and means "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses." by a sentient Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive. The term is used in science and philosophy, and in the study of artificial intelligence. Sentience is used in the study of consciousness to describe the ability to have sensations or experiences, known to Western philosophers as "qualia". In eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical observing entity An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, though it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate. Entities are used in system developmental models that display communications and internal.

The variety usage reveals that the notion of document has rich social and cultural aspects besides the physical, functional and operational aspects.

• Document is just a practical concept which presently would be defined narrowly based on human understanding and perception of the external world.

• Document in its wider connotation could include matter in all its forms, even a universe could be perceived as a document on a wider scale.

• The practical construct requires the retention of information but the relevance of the information (utility, value are not decided as these depend upon the objectives of the user and the purpose for which he accesses the information)

• The information must also be with reference to the observing entity be retained for a reasonable period of time wherein it can be observed. Fleeting images which cannot be seen are almost as if never observed.

Conceptualization in analytical philosophy

The notion of document admits both an empirical (in terms of a fuzzy set of real-world instances) and analytical characterization. The analytical characterization hinges on the semantic character of the word document, as well as the use of a primitive notion of document in accounts of larger communication constructs such as discourses, or related constructs such as language games.

The nominal 'document', like other nominals, exhibits familiar patterns of polysemy (a kind of ambiguity). For example, "document" might be used on an occasion to denote a certain body of information independently of how that information is physically rendered (as in 'the Bible is my favorite document.'; 'Have you finished reading all the documents for Monday's class yet?'), or it might be used to denote a particular physical instantiation of a body of information (as in 'that document is worn and needs to be re-bound.'; 'Return the documents you borrowed to the reference desk.'). This kind of polysemy bears some similarity to what Nunberg, 1979 termed "container/contents polysemy" (as in 'Mary broke the bottle' versus 'the baby finished the bottle'). These patterns of polysemy exhibited by 'document' matter for the following reason. A certain document qua body of information (e.g. the Bible, not a particular bound copy thereof) will have different properties than a document qua physical rendering of a body of information (e.g. a particular bound copy of the Bible). Importantly, the latter would have the property of being a static, physically bounded thing. The former would have the properties of being able to evolve over time, being susceptible of certain changes to information content, and being capable of supporting multiple physical instantiations that have allowable differences in information content. This distinction is relevant to the discussion of aspects and history of documents below.

Empirical characterization

In light of the polysemy Polysemy (from the Greek: πολυ-, poly-, "many" and σήμα, sêma, "sign") is the capacity for a sign (e.g., a word, phrase, etc.) or signs to have multiple meanings (sememes), i.e., a large semantic field. This is a pivotal concept within social sciences, such as media studies and linguistics of the core concept of document, it is useful to note a number of examples ranging from instances commonly understood as prototypical A prototype is an original type, form, or instance of something serving as a typical example, basis, or standard for other things of the same category. The word derives from the Greek πρωτότυπον , "primitive form", neutral of πρωτότυπος (prototypos), "original, primitive", from πρῶτος (protos), " documents, to instances that are understood as documents only in specialized or rare situations.

• Prototypical Documents: Letters, memos, legal forms, owners manual An owners manual is an instructional book or booklet that is supplied with almost all technologically advanced consumer products such as vehicles, home appliances and computer peripherals. Information contained in the owners manual typically includes:
• Documents of Record: Newspapers A newspaper is a regularly scheduled publication containing news, information, and advertising. By 2007 there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a day (55 million in the U.S). The worldwide recession of 2008, combined with the rapid growth of web-based alternatives, caused a serious decline in advertising and, magazines Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles, generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three. Magazines can be distributed through the mail; through sales by newsstands, bookstores or other vendors;
• Books: Textbooks A textbook or coursebook is a manual of instruction in any branch of study. Textbooks are produced according to the demands of educational institutions. Although most textbooks are only published in printed format, many are now available as online electronic books and increasingly in scanned format in P2P networks, novels A novel is a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century, cookbooks A cookbook is a book that contains information on cooking. It typically contains a collection of recipes, and may also include information on ingredient origin, freshness, selection and quality, encyclopedias An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge, comic books A comic book is a magazine made up of narrative artwork in the form of separate "panels" that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog (usually in word balloons, emblematic of the comic book art form) as well as including brief descriptive prose. The first comic book appeared in the United States of America in 1934,
• Canonical Documents: Code of law A Code is a type of legislation that purports to exhaustively cover a complete system of laws or a particular area of law as it existed at the time the code was enacted, by a process of codification. Though the process and motivations for codification are similar in common law and civil law systems, their usage is different. In a civil law country,, statute This word is used in contradistinction to the common law. Statutes acquire their force from the time of their passage unless otherwise provided. Statutes are of several kinds; namely, Public or private. Declaratory or remedial. Temporary or perpetual. 1. A temporary statute is one which is limited in its duration at the time of its enactment. It, constitution A constitution is a set of laws that a set of people have made and agreed upon for government—often codified as a written document—that enumerates and limits the powers and functions of a political entity. These rules together make up, i.e. constitute, what the entity is. In the case of countries and autonomous regions of federal countries the, religious text Religious texts, also known as scripture, are the texts which various religious traditions consider to be sacred, or of central importance to their religious tradition. Many religions and spiritual movements believe that their sacred texts are divinely or supernaturally inspired
• Transactional Documents: Cheques A cheque or check is a piece of paper (usually) that orders a payment of money. The person writing the cheque, the drawer, usually has a chequing account where their money is deposited. The drawer writes the various details including the money amount, date, and a payee on the cheque, and signs it, ordering their bank, know as the drawee, to pay, contracts In law, a contract is a legally binding agreement between two or more parties which, if it contains the elements of a valid legal agreement, is enforceable by law or by binding arbitration. A legally enforceable contract is an exchange of promises with specific legal remedies for breach. These can include compensatory remedy, whereby the, medical prescriptions A prescription is a health-care program implemented by a physician or other medical practitioner in the form of instructions that govern the plan of care for an individual patient. Prescriptions may include orders to be performed by a patient, caretaker, nurse, pharmacist or other therapist. Commonly, the term prescription is used to mean an order, receipt A receipt is a written acknowledgement that a specified article or sum of money has been received as an exchange for goods or services. The receipt acts as the title to the property obtained in the exchange[citation needed], forms A form is a document with spaces in which to write or select, for a series of documents with similar contents. The documents usually have the printed parts in common, possibly except for a serial number. Advantages of forms include:, Postage stamps A postage stamp is adhesive paper evidence of a fee paid for postal services. Usually a small rectangle attached to an envelope, the stamp signifies the person sending it has fully or partly paid for delivery. Postage stamps are the most popular way of paying for retail mail; alternatives include postal stationery such as prepaid-postage envelopes,
• Functional Documents: Portable Document Format Portable Document Format is a generic computer term.[citation needed] The best-known PDF implementation is Adobe PDF, a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. The remainder of this article discusses Adobe PDF exclusively (PDF) files, PostScript PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. PostScript is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas files, XML Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards files, email Electronic mail, commonly called email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages across the Internet or other computer networks. Originally, email was transmitted directly from one user to another computer. This required both computers to be online at the same time, a la instant messenger. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-
• Non-Prototypical Documents: Post-it notes A Post-it note is a piece of stationery with a re-adherable strip of adhesive on the back, designed for temporarily attaching notes to documents and to other surfaces: walls, desks, computer displays, and so forth. While now available in a wide range of colors, shapes, and sizes, Post-it Brand notes are most commonly a 3-inch square, canary yellow, fortune cookie A fortune cookie is a crisp cookie usually made from flour, sugar, vanilla, and oil with a "fortune" wrapped inside. A "fortune" is a piece of paper with words of faux wisdom or a vague prophecy. The message inside may also include a list of lucky numbers and a Chinese phrase with translation strips, maps A map is a visual representation of an area-a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes, paintings Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects may be used. In art the term describes both the act and the result which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper,, milk cartons, cereal boxes
• Non-Classical Digital Documents: Web pages A web page or webpage is a document or resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device, blogs A blog is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a, wikis Wikis may exist to serve a specific purpose, and in such cases, users use their editorial rights to remove material that is considered "off topic." Such is the case of the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. In contrast, open purpose wikis accept content without firm rules as to how the content should be organized
• Boundary Examples: The Pioneer plaque The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold-anodized aluminum plaques which were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 are intercepted by extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are on the Pioneer 11 Pioneer 11 was the second mission of the Pioneer program (after its sister probe Pioneer 10) to investigate Jupiter and the outer solar system, and the first to explore Saturn and its main rings. Pioneer 11 used Jupiter's mass in a gravity assist to alter its trajectory toward Saturn. The unmanned spacecraft was developed by NASA Ames Research spacecraft, designed by astronomer Carl Sagan Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, author, cosmologist, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. During his lifetime, he published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than, and using information assumed to be universal is an extreme example of a document that is intended to communicate with aliens. Conversely, the recorded and printed signals of the SETI project would constitute documents if they were discovered to contain alien communication.

Social aspects of documents

Documents play a key role in the construction of social reality (Searle, 1996) and therefore play a part in accounts of every important aspect of human society and culture. An example of this type of account is in the seminal account of the role of print in political evolution, Imagined Communities, (Anderson, B., 2006). More direct examples include the works of Marshall McLuhan Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory (McLuhan, 1964 and 1969). Many key social aspects of documents arise from their historically unchanging character. This aspect leads to a definition of a document as a talking thing (Levy, D., 2003), whose strengths and weaknesses both arise from its relative (historical) immutability with respect to oral forms of communication. The relative immutability of documents has thus historically been important for establishing a record of transient events, or for preserving information whose precise linguistic form is of ritual or practical importance (such as religious texts or legal documents). Note though, that historically many societies have accorded greater authority to disciplined oral traditions as more reliable than parallel written ones. With this caveat in mind, the following social aspects of information may be noted.

• Social Value: The information in documents as well as documents themselves are often valuable; the information because of the influence represented, and the document itself when it is believed to be a rare or unique and authentic representation of the information it contains.^{[citation needed]}
• Manifestation of authority: Documents are often produced to provide a record that will be considered authoritative in the future, particularly with respect to government. Consider receipts, titles, and deeds as examples of proof of ownership, and passports or driver's licenses as proof of identity.
• Conventional: Documents inherit a key feature of language-based communication in general: they are denoted as documents by convention (Lewis, 2002). Virtually any medium can constitute a document provided the people involved can agree on the meaning represented. Hence cave drawings, hieroglyphics, scrolls of sheepskin, sheets of papyrus, ink on paper, magnetic tape and electronic files are all documents under certain accounts.
• Manifestation of economic labor: Historically, the effort required to produce a document has been significant, so only the most important documents were created. The Illuminated manuscript An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniature illustrations. In the strictest definition of the term, an illuminated manuscript only refers to manuscripts decorated with gold or silver, but in both common usage and modern scholarship, the of the pre-Gutenberg era demonstrates the cost (and associated imputed value) of documents. Historically, the cost of producing documents has declined, while their functional characteristics ("affordances" in the sense of Sellen and Harper, 2001) have become richer.
• Manifestation of business processes: Documents play many roles in the internal management of a business as well in the interfaces between businesses and their suppliers, employees, and customers. Current trends toward longer value chains and increased regulation increase the number of documents that must be generated and processed.
• Instruments of Governance and Law: The unchanging aspect of documents is crucial to the consistent communication of policy and administration of law to citizens. Documents that play such roles include constitutions, corporate annual reports and religious texts.
• Analytical philosophical character: The notion of document plays a role in political philosophy (example, the notion of social contract as a primitive construct), as well as in the philosophy of law
• Role in Religion: Documents play a key role in religion, and constitute canonical content. Document-related terms such as dogma and doctrine have today acquired pejorative connotations primarily due to historical events associated with religious documents.
• Cultural Significance: Documents play a central role in art of all varieties. In the movie Office Space Office Space is a 1999 American comedy film written and directed by Mike Judge. It satirizes work life in a typical 1990s software company, focusing on a handful of individuals who are fed up with their jobs. The film's sympathetic portrayal of ordinary IT workers garnered it a cult following among those in that profession, but the film also for instance, central plot elements are frustration with bureaucratic process involving the fictional "TPS reports" and a malfunctioning printer In computing, a printer is a peripheral which produces a hard copy of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and are attached by a printer cable or, in most newer printers, a USB cable to a computer which serves as a document.
• Metaphoric Significance: Metaphors based on documents permeate our thinking, ranging from the obvious ("let's start with a clean sheet for this design", "this is a new chapter in my life" and "she wrote the book on that") to the highly allegorical ("All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated" — John Donne).

Functional characteristics

Documents also manifest several, more localized characteristics that determine how we use them in everyday life:

• Manifest nature: Information is physical, i.e. it always must exist in a tangible form, even when digital. IBM computer scientist Rolf Landauer Rolf William Landauer was an IBM physicist who in 1961 argued that when information is lost in an irreversible circuit, the information becomes entropy and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat. This principle is relevant to reversible computing, quantum information and quantum computing is credited with this observation and working out its implications. By virtue of being realizations of chunks of information, documents are necessarily physical in all their forms.
• Contextuality and Situatedness: All communication takes place in a context, which includes at least the shared understanding of the parties communicating (Lewis, 2002). Explicit and implicit references to the context can convey a large amount of meaning by building on the shared understanding, but that meaning is lost to another party that does not share that context. For example, Shakespeare in the original would be incomprehensible to modern readers simply because of the evolution of language and spelling since the seventeenth century, and modern readers (besides Shakespeare scholars) normally read modernized versions. Similarly, hypertext documents exist in a context which is lost if printed, leading to a different offline reading context.
• Evolvability: When we think of a document as a definitive source containing the best known information about a topic there is need to change that information as more is learned. This is frequently done by revising the document into a new version or edition. Typically, older versions are archived to facilitate understanding how the document has changed. In modern contexts, when technologies such as wikis or software source code are under discussion, this evolvability can require very sophisticated version control technologies.
• Renderability: Every abstract entity An abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but rather exists as a type of thing . In philosophy, an important distinction is whether an object is considered abstract or concrete. Abstract objects are sometimes called abstracta (sing. abstractum) and concrete objects are sometimes called concreta (sing that is understood to be a document in some context can be rendered, often in more than one way. A rendition of a document refers to a particular physical or electronic representation of the information from the document. For example, a portable document format (pdf) representation and a web page may contain the same information but have substantially different properties and appearances. We think of them as different renditions (or renderings) of the same document. We might similarly consider different translations of a document to be the same document although differences in language context and structure may make it impossible to express precisely the same meaning in both languages.
• Affordances: Documents in digital and physical forms manifest various "affordances" (Sellen and Harper, 2001, Gladwell, 2002)). The affordances of a particular rendition of a document determine its uses. For example, paper has the affordances of allowing flipping and easy tactile manipulation, while digital forms are easier to edit.

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