Artifact Analysis Paper

Upload to Blackboard by 11.59 PM onSunday, October 5

This assignment is worth 50 points. Students will embark on a search for data on how an artifact comes to be and chronicle the journey in a “travelogue” style short paperfour to five pages in length (this includes components lists). The goal here is to practice the “thick description” described in Repko and in this course.

ASSIGNMENT

Select any three dimensional artifact. It must be at least three dimensional (an apple, a coffee grinder, a concert poster, a tee shirt, etc). Make a list of its MAJOR components.  You do not have to research all of the obscure pieces, but you should identity its most important components.

Example: 

Turkey: Brand?  Store?  Distribution? Where is the turkey farm?  Can you get details on how they are raised/slaughtered?

Tee shirt: Brand? Distribution? Where is production? Material? Farms?

The purpose of this assignment is help students hone their research skills by gathering information from accurate sources.  Further, at each “stop” in the process, there are a web of questions to be asked (both disciplinary and IDST). Good questions should flow from this process.  Be sure to note important concepts that must be defined and discussed to fully understand your findings.  Employ what Repko calls “thick description” by looking at your artifact through various lenses and from various points of view. Note which lenses you used and what you discovered by thinking this way.

PART A: Type your components list followed by a typed “travelogue” for the major pieces. 

PART B: Tell its story to the best of your ability in four-to-five pages. Specific details, interdisciplinarity, and complexity via “thick description” should be developed in this story. Tell the story the way you see fit, but use the language we have discussed in this course (see Repko and Ruggiero). The questions below are meant to help you write your story, but you may deem other questions to be more important depending on your artifact.

1. How close could you get to the source? How difficult was it to get this information?
2. At what points did you clearly see the “interdisciplinarity” and/or complexity?
3. What disciplines were most recognizable to you during this process? Why was this the case? What insights were gained?
4. How does this intersect with other content from class?
5. What major implications does this have on your thinking about this artifact? About other “stuff”?
6. What are the most important questions we should be asking about our “stuff”?
7. As an IDST student, what might you see here that discipline-specific majors might miss?Click here to place an order  for a similar  paper  and have exceptional work done by our team and get A+results