artifacts

Noun

artifact (plural artifacts)

1. (US) An 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, 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...
2. (US) An object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence, not necessarily of direct human origin.
3. (US) Something 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
4. (US) A 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. (US) An 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. (US) A 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.
      • This JPEG image has been so highly compressed that it has unsightly artifacts, making it unsuitable for the cover of our magazine.

See all 9 meanings of artifact