Skills Assignment: Analyzing Artifacts

Estimated Time to Complete: 1.5 hours

For your final argument essay, you will need to bring together the sources you have read in unit 2 along
with the sources you will gather to investigate solutions to issues in American society. You will need to
“advance the conversation” in progress from the sources you used for your Literature Review by writing
an argument essay in which you use the sources from the literature review in addition to outside sources
and artifacts to analyze and propose solutions to current social, cultural, or economic issues. This
assignment will help you practice the skills necessary for analyzing that artifact or “text.”

This assignment will help you analyze artifacts. Follow the directions below to complete each step of the
assignment. Once you have completed each step, make a PDF of your document and upload it to Canvas.
You could do each bullet point as a separate list or a concept map.

Step 1: Looking back at your previous assignment about stakeholders, pick two artifacts (object, text,
image, etc.) relevant to two different stakeholders you listed for your issue/organization. For instance, in
the example of tutoring at Binford, one artifact could be the school itself (or a photo of it) and the other
could be the website of the Developing Men of Color group. Take your time to really consider what each
artifact portrays and how. We will use the acronym SHOWED to guide that analysis as you write answers
to each of the following prompts.

• S What do you sense here? (Describe what the senses literally perceive–what you see, hear, etc.)

• H What is actually happening here? How does that affect you? How is that effect created? (What is the
unseen story behind the artifact? What does the heart perceive? How does this artifact make you feel?
What sensory elements of the artifact evoke those responses? The sensory plus context and
construction of the artifact and your reaction.)

• O How does this artifact relate to our lives and our class topic? (Social issues, historical problems,
current events–local, national, or global; etc.)

• W Why are things this way? (Why does this artifact exist? What does its existence say about the
world? What has to be true for this thing to exist? How did we get here? What sustains this situation?)

• E How could this artifact educate people or effect change?

• D What could we do about any of the issues you raised in your analysis?

1) https://www.kkpsi.org/. This is the Kappa Kappa Psi National Honorary Band Fraternity Inc.’s
official website. This website shows why this organization operates, what its core values are and
 how this organization came to be. This websiterelates to our topic because of the fact that it
promotes leadership and musicianship across the United States. And with this organization we
can help incarcerated individuals and communities build leadership skills and music skills.

2)
3) This is a picture of the criminal justice system and this system effectively you every day. So it is
very relevant to every person. This artifact exists because without it life would have no checks
and balances and would be total anarchy. The can help educate people to look and try and
understand this system and its implications. Hopefully with my plan we could help reform and fix
the problems of this system.

Step 2: For a reasonably good example of a student essay that derives from a similar method to analyze
and interpret an artifact, check out this piece on the Vietnam War Memorial. Then answer:
1. What could you need to do to improve your own analysis above in two specific ways
based on what you read?
a. Giving more details and helping the audience understand why this artifact is
important.
2. What are two ways the author connects specific physical attributes of the memorial to
bigger concepts/abstract issues?
a. The authors talks about how we should be recognizing and respecting our fallen
soldiers but people call the Memorial ‘the black gash of shame’, a ‘degrading
ditch,’ a ‘black spot in American history,’ a ‘tomb-stone,’ a ‘slap in the face,’ and a
‘wailing wall for draft dodgers and New Lefters of the future’ . Also how to the
veter it means something completely different “the wall is an atonement for
their treatment since the war; to the families and friends of those who died, it is
an official recognition of their sorrow and an opportunity to express a grief that
was not previously sanctioned; to others”