ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the possibilities for using artifactual forms of data in theory-generating punishment and society scholarship, in part by sharing some of author own experiences using social artifacts to develop theoretical accounts of punitive phenomena, particularly their cultural dimensions. It also describes some of the predominant forms of documents and other artifactual data that can be utilized in social research generally, and author consider their possibilities and limits as sources. The chapter focuses on the communicative properties of artifacts, including the key roles of language, context, and audience/source/purpose in making sense of various forms of artifacts. It also provides a brief overview of several different qualitative methodological approaches to artifactual analysis. The chapter aims to make substantive contributions to the understanding of punishment through the analysis of documents and other social artifacts, as a way of illustrating the utility of such data sources for theory-generating projects.
