Documents, Types of

A document is any kind of physically embodied text, and a handwritten or printed text on paper, such as a letter or government report, is the archetypal document. However, the range of documents is much wider than this. We may classify documents as written (where the text is visible words), audio (where the text is sound that can be accessed throughaural channels), and visual(where the text is a designed or pictorial representation). A text may be produced with a pen, a pencil, a paint brush, a printing machine, a tape recorder, or a computer, and it may be inscribed on clay, stone, parchment, paper, magnetic disks, or electronic display screens. The full range of documents includes newspapers, diaries, stamps, directories, handbills, maps, photographs, paintings, gramophone records, tapes, and computer files.

Documents are sometimes seen as the particular source material for the historian, but they have a wide range of uses across the social sciences. The classical sociologists made far greater use of documentary sources than they did of survey or observational methods. Karl Marx based Capital on his heavy use of the publications of the factory inspectors, Max Weber used religious tracts and pamphlets in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Emile Durkheim drew on a variety of official statistics to produce Suicide.

Documents can be classified most usefully in terms of their authorship and the conditions for access to them.

Authorship can be subdivided according to whether documents originate in the personal sphere or the public, official sphere, and official documents can be subdivided according to their origin in state or private bureaucracies. This differentiation rarely can be drawn with any precision, particularly in the premodern period. In medieval Europe, for example, a distinction between personal family papers, church papers, and state papers would not make a great deal [Page 282]of sense because of the highly personalized nature of patrimonial authority.

Access concerns the conditions under which documents may be available to people other than their authors. Documents may be “closed” if they are available only to a very limited group of people, such as those who produce them and their bureaucratic superiors. If documents are “restricted,” they are accessible to a wider group, but under limited conditions determined by their producers or their guardians. The most liberal conditions are “open” access through archiving or publication. Archival access exists where documents have been stored and made available to a wide public: Documents may be available with only minimal bureaucratic restrictions, such as the need to register or to acquire a reader's ticket (see data archives, archiving qualitative data). Where documents are published, access is almost completely open because they are accessible to all who are able to afford them.

These two dimensions can be combined as shown in Table 1 to produce 12 different kinds of documents. Closed personal documents (Type 1) include letters, diaries, household account books, and many other domestic items. These kinds of documents are normally available only to the individual who owns them or to the immediate household that produced them. Personal documents may move from one category of access to another. Some may become available more widely if they are deposited and stored in public records offices (Type 3), and some may be published (Type 4). Diaries, for example, begin as purely closed documents, but are often produced with the intention of making them available to a wider readership. The records of many landed and wealthy families have been deposited in public archives and so become more easily accessible. Many such documents, however, remain in private hands—if they survive for any period at all—and are closed to public access unless specific permission is granted by the owner (Type 2).

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