A synergetic paradigm for the scientific study of documents

Document theory is the least explored area of study about documents. It lags significantly behind applied document research, which summarizes various document processing practices that have accumulated for thousands of years. This problem has recently been complicated by the rise of so-called general document theories. The boundaries of the document concept have become blurred due to the development of parallel areas of study and their forced differentiation into “classic” and “library” document science. In addition, knowledge about objects that are referred to as documents that can neither be properly integrated nor applied in practice is being developed. This situation is mainly due to the lack of attention that is paid by document scientists to the theoretical and methodological issues of document science. This paper reviews the origins, nature, and the social roles of documents from the perspective of a synergetic paradigm and has the goal of constructing a synergetic document theory.