I had never had much patience with or interest in Warhol's work. One day, not too long after the accident, I drove my fragile residue of memory to the Andy Warhol Museum thinking that the soup cans and silver balloons might distract me. What was once an object, which my father loved for its comfortable relationship with his bad back, had now become a vehicle of thought, a vehicle through which I would try to understand what had happened. In that moment the Bonneville, my father's car, took on special purposes. The Pontiac Bonneville in question was just a car until the night another car crossed over the centerline of a four-lane highway and crashed head-on into it. But how does it come to be that thing? For example, how might I transform a 1985 blue Pontiac Bonnevillefrom an old wrecked car into an artifact of intrest? Part of that persuasive effect depends on the reach of this particular journal (Kaufer & Carley, 1993), but part will lie with my ability to convince you to remake steel and glass, paint and canvas, and these bits you see on your computer screen into a mental artifact of my design. That an artifact is something made by a human being, a thing with archaeological or cultural interest, is not in question. To those of you already complaining that I am about to make a word mean nothing by making it mean everything, stay with me a bit longer. Artifacts of the mind live only as long as individuals can hold them, and like the objects found on a dig, can be left untouched, until one day they become a persuasive act, one which might or might not reach further than that single mind. However, I would argue that an artifact is first and foremost the fragile residue of memory crafted into a mental representation by an individual.

An artifact is, in part, a product of the collective memory (Middleton & Edwards, 1990), or as Alan Radley ( 1990) conveys, an object that has been transformed for special purposes within the culture. An artifact is more than the object that stubs our toes or the ancient document that tears at the edges it goes beyond the virtual bits we see but cannot touch. Were I to encounter that friend today, I would not only apply the term artifact to my data, I would take that claim further. He cautioned me against the use of that term. My colleague simply could not wrap his mind around the idea that an artifact's third dimension could be so narrow, its material so contemporary, and its value so seemingly insignificant. But our discussion did not get past my use of the term artifact. A few years ago, in conversation with a friend in engineering, I mentioned that I had been collecting and analyzing artifacts вЂ“ conference covers, magazine layouts, art history texts вЂ“ anything that might help me understand how words, typography, and images collaborate on the page to make messages that could not be produced by text or image alone.

Persuasive artifact meaning