Types of Documents

Here we present some characteristics and examples of the different types of documents.
1. Popular Culture Documents
  1. Are designed to entertain, inform, and perhaps persuade the public.
  2. Examples
    1. Television, film, radio, newspapers, literary works, photography, cartoons, and the Internet are sources of “public” data that help to track the change and trends.
2. Personal Documents
  1. Provide subjective conclusions
  2. Examples
    1. Diaries, letters, home videos, children’s growth records, scrapbooks and photo albums, calendars, autobiographies, travel logs, and personal blogs.
  3. Refer to any first-person narrative that describes an individual’s actions, experiences, and beliefs
  4. Give us a snapshot (personal perspective) into what the author thinks is important.
3. Public Records
  1. Reveal
    1. These might be otherwise unknown through direct observation
    2. Aspirations
    3. Arrangements
    4. Tensions
    5. Relationships
    6. Decisions
  2. The official, ongoing records of a society’s activities.
  3. Examples
    1. Ethnographer field notes, diary entries, reports to various agencies, books, newspaper articles, works of fiction about the culture, and photographs.
4. Visual Documents
  1. Available online or in the physical setting that one is studying.
  2. Capture activities and events as they happen, including communication patterns
    1. Facial expressions, gestures, and emotions
  3. Examples
    1. Film, video, photography, and web-based media. Public records, personal documents, and popular cultural materials can all be in visual formats.

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Types of Documents

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	Created by Sebastián Gómez over 4 years ago