Write notes about digital document technologies
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When we refer to a paper document, a papyrus document, or a microfilmed document, the meaning is clear. However, the idea of a "digital document" is more difficult. We can recognize e-mail and a technical report generated by a wordprocessor as digital documents, but beyond these simple examples the concept of a "document" becomes less clear. Is a software program a document? It has lines of language-like text. Is an operating system a document? One can enumerate different types of digital documents and this is necessary because of the need to specify standards in order to achieve efficiency and interoperability. But if one seeks completeness, the process becomes arbitrary and intellectually unsatisfying because it is not clear where the frontier between documents and non-documents should be.
A paper document is distinguished, in part, by the fact that it is on paper. But that aspect, the technological medium, is less helpful with digital documents. An e-mail message and a technical report exist physically in a digital environment as a string of bits, but so does everything else in a physical environment. "Multimedia," which used to denote multiple, physically-different media, is now of renewed interest, because, ironically, the multiple media can be reduced to the mono-medium of electronically stored bits.
For practical purposes, people develop pragmatic definitions, such as "anything that can be given a file name and stored on electronic media" or "a collection of data plus properties of that data that a user chooses to refer to as a logical unit." And, as so often in discussions of information, one finds definitions of "document" that focus on one aspect and are often highly metaphorical, such as "`captured' knowledge," "data in context," and "an organized view of information."