Document From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search For the R.E.M. album, see Document (album). For the similarly-named Surrealist journal, see Documents (journal). This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (May 2008) A document (noun) is a bounded physical representation of body of information designed with the capacity (and usually intent) to communicate. A document may manifest symbolic, 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.