artifact

plural artifacts · alternative UK artefact

1. USAn object made or shaped by human hand or labor.

   Given increasing investment in an IT (information technology) artifact (i.e., online service website), it is becoming important to retain existing customers.

   2010 May 28, Young Sik Kang, Heeseok Lee, “Understanding the role of an IT artifact in online service continuance: An extended perspective of user satisfaction.(Report)”, in Computers in Human Behavior, →DOI

2. USAn object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence, not necessarily of direct human origin.
3. USSomething viewed as a product of human agency or conception rather than an inherent element.

   The very act of looking at a naked model was an artifact of male supremacy.

   2004, Philip Weiss, American Taboo: A Murder In The Peace Corps

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   Overall the signage at NIE has the appearance being a top-down artefact driven by institutional policy with English set as the default language.

   2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 6

4. USA finding or structure in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error.

   The spot on his lung turned out to be an artifact of the X-ray process.

   1. USbiologyAn appearance or structure in protoplasm due to death, the method of preparation of specimens, or the use of reagents, and not present during life.
   2. UScomputingA perceptible distortion that appears in an audio or video file or an image as a result of applying a lossy compression or other inexact processing algorithm or of physical interference in an acquisition process.

      The opacity in his chest radiograph turned out to be an artifact due to the film.

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      This JPEG image has been so highly compressed that it has unsightly artifacts, making it unsuitable for the cover of our magazine.

      These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

      2023 February 9, Ted Chiang, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”, in The New Yorker

5. USarchaeologyAn object, such as a tool, ornament, or weapon of archaeological or historical interest, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation.

   The dig produced many Roman artifacts.

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   Holy shit! It is fascinating when a country’s culture seeps even into their math lessons, although it’s not really surprising. As a British child, our math questions were “if Johnny has two artifacts and Dinesh has two artifacts, then how many artifacts is Johnny about to have?” The answer, of course, “all the artifacts, Dinesh’s family can come visit them in a British museum whenever they’re in town.”

   2017, Tim Carvell [et al.], “North Korea”, in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 4, episode 21, John Oliver (actor), Warner Bros. Television, via HBO

   1. USarchaeologyA powerful weapon, armor or another object, often with magical properties.
6. USabbreviationellipsiscomputingEllipsis of build artifact.
7. USAny object in the collection of a museum. May be used sensu stricto only for human-made objects, or may include ones that are not human-made.