I am still dragging my heels on artifact analysis. I suspect this is because I decided the best topics for my artifact analysis only recently. You see, there is a lot of Steampunk artifacts out there. Too many to categorize, as shown by my experiment, Rate My Steampunk!, where I asked people to rate the artifacts I posted.
While preparing for my IST Conference presentation, however, I was speaking to Ben about the difficulties of showing exactly what I mean about how people appropriate to fit their personal identity, or what they would like to portray about their personal identity. During this conversation, it struck me that I should be comparing artifacts that have the same starting point, but end up looking very different depending on the person. How better to showcase the way appropriations can signify personal identity, than to do a direct comparison of the decisions people make when making something their own?
Therefore, my artifact analysis will focus on a particular subset for explicit comparison/contrast. I’m excited. This will be fun!
I spent this past entire week working on a presentation that I gave yesterday at the local Instructional Systems Technology conference. I was freaking out for some reason, and literally did nothing but prepare my slides for the presentation. I move quickly through my slides, so I wasn’t surprised that I had 75 slides for a 20 minute presentation. Other people thought I was insane until I actually went through my presentation.
It was super well received, which surprised me.
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It occurred to me that I’ve never really outlined who I hope to interview. At least, not on the blog. I’ve set up a LiveJournal to get insight into the huge LiveJournal Steampunk community, so I’m going to post the same basic introduction here that I posted there. For posterity’s sake and all that jazz.
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I’d like to blog about some of my insights in terms of commonalities and differences between the four interviews I have completed. The goal, of course, is to determine the reflexive nature between personal identity and the act of creating/appropriating an object into one’s life.
Methodology
Most important at this point is how I’m analyzing the interviews. Because interviews are qualitative data, my job as a researcher is to make sense of, and interpret, the information in terms of the meaning my interview subjects bring. Through my interpretation, I should be able to make abstracted connections between the interview subjects. This will help inform the nuances of my proposed design guidelines.
I’m using a four-point methodology of each interview, as follows.
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I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get around to artifact analysis because I distinctly remember enjoying it once I actually got into the flow of analyzing Steampunk artifacts. That said, I thought I’d go the opposite route of my work-in-progress, where I selected the “pretty” of Steampunk. My reviewers pointed out that I could learn from the “ugly” or “unsuccessful” appropriations just as well as the pretty or successful ones, and I agree.
Fleming Framework
First, I want to disclose that I am using the Fleming framework, as proposed in [1]. The Fleming framework for artifact analysis is two-fold: classification and analysis. The five-point classification consists of the artifact’s properties: history, material, construction, design, and function. The four-point analysis consists of more cultural understanding of the artifact: identification, evaluation based on values of the present culture, cultural analysis using on selected aspects of the artifact’s culture, and interpretation.
Everyone still with me? Excellent. So shall we begin with the analysis? Indeed we shall.
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