Here we have a look at the word artifact and the root of it's adoption in the English language.
Etymology of artifact
From the Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary
- Middle English, from Old English eart, akin to old Norse est, ert (thou) art...
The Latin "ars" was the forerunner of Art. As in "ars gracia arstis" which translates to art for arts sake. An art is a skill and it is the antonym of science.
The word fact became part of the English language in the 15th century. It comes from the Latin word "factum". A fact is an archaic record of something done.
Therefore an artifact is an archaic record of something done through the use of skill.
Let's look at some of the ways the word artifacts and culture have made their place in our societies.
- To the archeologist the artifact is anything that is made or used by mankind
- To the computer geek who develops software programs Artifacts, plural, is a bug tracking system already coded.
- Again to the computer geek the singular word Artifact refers to tangible by-products produced during the software development process. Such a query often returns an error message or does not allow the intended program to run properly or to run at all since there is an undesired alteration in the data. This is often referred to by programmers and IT professionals as the digital artifact.
- Again in computer linguistics the "document artifact" phrase is important. The document is a written account of ownership or obligation and it is recorded in several different digital file formats. Documents are referenced whenever outside sources are quoted directly. These documents can be legally binding. In a sense even an article is a document since it can misrepresent facts about people, places, or things, and online articles can become evidence in personal injury court cases. The document artifact. The document is an object. The process of creating a new document or object is called instantiation. The document saved in digital format is an instance of a class. ..............
- The cultural artifact and the social artifact is the stuff that makes urban legends. The cultural artifact can be any human made object (a physical document written or else) which gives information about the culture of its users and the creator of the document or object. The social artifact pertains more to ideologies and objects created by groups however it also includes ideologies and objects created by the individual. The social artifact is said to reflect the social behaviour of the group, the individual, and the observer
- In medical science we find the Iatrogenic artifact. When a medical treatment goes wrong and turns into a medical problem then the objective or the intended medical therapy result as failed to achieve it's goal. The artifact is the by-product of the treatment. It is said to be Iatrogenic. This term refers to iatrogenesis. Iatros was a Greek physician of old and Iatros meant "healer" in Greek................
- In pop culture you find a Norway band called Artifact. You also find metal band from France who use the misspelling "Artefact" as their stage name. An american artist called Steve Roach made an album of tribal ambient music and called it "Artifacts".
- Again in popular culture we find the title "The Artifact" associated to an object in the TV series Eureka. This object is a biological organism that dates back to sometime before the "hypothesized big bang". This means that it was and remains an object of a singularity or a paradigm of objects trapped in a vaccuum. The Eureka story line goes that "The Artifact" remains trapped on Earth and can be tapped into by the sixth sense. It is a channel to the Akashic Records which is a archive of all existence. In a sense the Akashic record is the super collective or the Matrix or the psychic source and "The Artifact" is the doorway to that library.
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