2. 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
4. ● Virtual Artifact
An immaterial
object that exists in
the human mind or in
a digital environment
Example :
Internet
Intranet
Virtual reality
Cyberspace
5. ● 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.
6. ● Digital Artifact
Any 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.
7. ● 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.
8. ● 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.
9. ● 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.
11. 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
