Examples of Parallel Documents 
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Documents are intrinsically parallel.  Sound too complicated?  Sorry.  It's always this way.  That's the nature of information-- it comes in packages which supplement and disagree.

Example: The Bible.

The "book" that is called The Bible actually exists in many parallel versions.  The Old Testament is basically the Hebrew Torah (of which an earlier, shorter version has recently been discovered in Ethiopia).  The New Testament is a series of writings in Greek.  Then there are the various translations of both Old and New Testament, either affected by culture and politics, or (some may say) guided by Divine Protection into perfect representations of the Word of God.  Yet there are so many differing translations: for example, the English translations known as the King James Version (Episcopalian/Church of England), the Douay (Catholic) version, and various Twentieth Century versions.  Then there are the translations into all other languages-- with differences in meaning that no one can know.

All of these, taken together, are "The Bible."

In addition, there are the Coptic Bible, the Greek Orthodox Bible, the Islamic Koran (said to be a parallel version), the Book of Mormon, and various books referred to as "Apocrypha", all of which have legitimate claim to be considered as versions of "The Bible".  (A large work called The Interpreter's Bible collates some of these parallel materials.)

Example: "Rasho-Mon"

The Japanese novel and Kurosawa film "Rasho-Mon" (-- note to my English-speaking readers: you have to pronounce it with the emphasis on the first O, or they won't know in Japan what you're talking about--) is the same story told six times by six different characters, including a ghost.

Which story is "true"?  No one knows.  But the the movie is about the parallel structure of all the stories together.

We think of Shakespeare's plays as being unique objects.  However, Shakespeare's plays have come down to us in various versions, several of which are by Shakespeare, and many of which have been severely modified.  "Hamlet" consists of *all* these versions, including also the "Hamlet" movies starring (respectively) Lawrence Olivier, Richard Burton, Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branagh.

When Americans refer to "the Bill of Rights", they are ordinarily referring to the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  But there is another Bill of Rights from which it derived: the Bill of Rights of the state of Virginia, written by George Mason.

These two parallel Bills of Rights may be thought of, for many purposes, as one document.

The novel Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov, consists of two parts: a beautiful poem of a thousand lines, entitled "Pale Fire", supposedly by a character named John Shade; and a ridiculous commentary by a character named Charles Kinbote.  The novel is the relation between these two parallel documents.

Often two listings need to be compared.  We may think of each of these listings as a version, and the set of listings as a document.

Example: The Catholic saints, the Episcopalian saints, the Byzantine saints, the Albigensian saints.  These give us overlapping lists of the official saints recognized by each denomination.  (And a time-series of Catholic saint listings, for example, would show the now-decanonized St. Christopher and St.Nicholas and when they lost official favor.)

My favorite example of parallel documents comes from columnist/man-about-the-Valley Robert X.Cringeley, whose real name is Mark Stevens.  He tells me this story from his work on the Presidential commission that investigated the Three Mile Island disaster.

According to Stevens, the Federal disaster management agency (whatever it was called at that time) first denied having known about the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and then revealed that actually they had had fifty telephone lines into the nuclear plant at the time of the accident-- all fifty conversations being simultaneously recorded.  Stevens says he had the recordings seized under subpoena and then transcribed.

We may consider these fifty recordings and their fifty textual transcriptions as ONE SINGLE DOCUMENT.

It was recently announced* that 284 episodes of "The Carol Burnett Show", and all the associated documents (some 350,000 pages) will be donated to the UCLA library.  We may think of this as being 384 parallel documents (a set for each show-- notes, scripts, and the recorded show itself); or we may think of the whole collection as a single, fairly large-scale parallel document.

*(From http://cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/News/9811/18/showbuzz/index.html):
 
LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Comedienne Carol Burnett has announced that all 284 episodes of her "The Carol Burnett Show" will be housed for posterity at the University of California, Los Angeles. The collection, which also includes 350,000 pages of music, script notes and commercials, will be housed at the UCLA Library and in  the university's Film and Television Archive.
 
"I'm so happy that we can share the many years of music and sketches from our shows with the students of UCLA and people interested in the entertainment industry," Burnett said Monday in announcing her donation.  "This is a wonderful way for the material to continue to have a life." The popular television comedy hour aired on CBS from 1967 to 1978 and won 25 Emmy Awards.