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DOCUMENTS ARE PARALLEL BY NATURE 
 
Documents are intrinsically parallel.  Sound too complicated?  Sorry.  That's the nature of information-- it comes in packages which supplement and disagree.

Right now, most computer people still think of documents as independent and standing alone.  This is a naive stage of understanding, looking at individual pieces and not seeing the whole-- like the biology of two hundred years ago.

But many documents are intrinsically parallel.  This is where the hard document work lies, and what computers must be set up for.

Parallel documents come in different forms--

Parallel versions.

Coupled documents. Non-parallel documents are the EXTREME CASE.   Maintaining, intercomparing and working with connections among parallel versions and coupled texts is what the hard document work is really about.  This is what computer document work must be set up for.
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