In order to understand and design learning environments that support new literacies, we must develop methods to describe the creative production of literacy artifacts. In this paper, we describe bidirectional artifact analysis, a framework that employs ethnographic observations of participants in situ, interviews over time, and the artifacts they create to trace young peoples’ creative production practices. While typical descriptive analyses move forwards, we move bidirectionally—from final product backwards and from initial idea forwards—to better understand participants’ learning processes and the role of social, collaborative audiences in that learning.
