CLASS-PRESENTATIONon

Primary Sources of Information : ArtifactsDate : 09.04.2014.

bySamhati Soor,

Roll No. MLIB 08,MSLIS,DRTC,ISI BC, India.

Artefact● The word “Artefact”/”Artifact”

came from Latin word “artefactum”. “Arte” means “by or using art” and “factum” means “something made”.

● Literally “something made using art”

● An object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest

● an archaelogical find

● Anti-capitalism

● Home-made/hand crafted

● Different from the established industrial model

Types● Cultural/Social

nakshi kantha

● Virtual Artifact An immaterial object that exists in the human mind or in a digital environment Example : Internet Intranet Virtual reality Cyberspace

● Visual Artifact

Anomaly during visual representation of e.g. digital graphics and imagery

● Compression Artifact

A noticeable distortion of media (including images, audio, and video) caused by the application of lossy data compression.

● Digital ArtifactAny undesired alteration in data introduced in a digital process by an involved technique and/or technology.

● Artifact in UML (Unified Modeling Language)

The specification of a physical piece of information that is used or produced by a software development process, or by deployment and operation of a system.

● An artifact is an object that has been intentionally made or produced for a certain purpose.

● Often the word ‘artifact’ is used in a more restricted sense to refer to simple, hand-made objects which represent a particular culture.

● According to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, an artifact is “a usually simple object (as a tool or an ornament) showing human workmanship and modification as distinguished from a natural object.”

● The Oxford English Dictionary defines an artifact (artefact) as “anything made by human art and workmanship; an artificial product.”

● In experimental science, the expression ‘artifact’ is sometimes used to refer to experimental results which are not manifestations of the natural phenomena under investigation, but are due to the particular experimental arrangement, and hence indirectly to human agency.

● Aristotle divided existing things into those that “exist by nature” and those existing “from other causes”.

The art of making something involves intentional agency; thus an artifact may be defined as an object that has been intentionally made for some purpose.

● An artifact has necessarily a maker or an author; thus artifact and author can be regarded as correlative concepts (Hilpinen 1993, 156–157): An object is an artifact if and only if it has an author.

● The products of an artifact maker's actions can be divided into the objects intended by the author and unintended products. When a tailor makes a coat for his customer, his intention is to make a coat of a certain size and style, but he also produces scraps of cloth as by-products of his work. Such by-products are products of an artifact maker's intentional actions, but they are not intended products.

● Stereotypical examples of artifacts, e.g., tools, weapons, and ornaments, are usually intended products, and the definition of an artifact as an object intentionally made for a certain purpose applies to such objects. However, in the anthropological and archaeological literature the word is sometimes used in a wider sense for all objects produced by human activities.

Scope● Archaeology● Anthropology● Ethnology ● Sociology● SoftwareDocumentation● Software Engineering● Natural Science● Signal Processing● Computer Graphics● Data Compression● Iatrogenesis● Distortion● Telecommunication● Pixelization

The philosopher Marx W. Wartofsky distinguished several types of artifacts:

primary artifacts, which are used in production (e.g., a hammer, a fork, a lamp, a camera, etc.)

secondary artifacts, which are representations of primary artifacts (e.g., a user manual for a camera)

tertiary artifacts, which are representations of secondary artifacts

References

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artifact/

http://people.umass.edu/lrb/files/bak08shrM.pdf

https://www.wikipedia.org/

https://www.google.co.in/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=fe9EU9WGN8jM8gfI64GwAQ