I’ve was up at 6am today (Saturday!) recording the audio for the virtual community presentation. The family sleeps and the house enjoys a rare moment of quiet.

However, it made me think how much easier it is to create a textual artefact. The noise of kids, TVs and radios, Xbox 360s etc, can be sort of filtered out as I type but not really as I record. I made a few slides last night but had to bribe my children with lollies for just a couple of minutes of (relative) quiet.

Anyway, all this to say that multimodal artefact creation in an already noisy multimodal world is quite difficult. I may go all Godard on my next multimodal artefact and include some of the above-mentionned background noises – the traces of the material conditions of the text’s production. Or I may just write text … LOL!

A propos of my study of a virtual community, I’ve just made a Keynote (PowerPoint for Macs) presentation which I’m trying to convert into a Quicktime movie. It seems to do this ok although I keep falling down when I try to upload it to YouTube. I suspect it doesn’t like the option I’ve checked for manually advancing each slide. I may have to rethink this as a Slideshare presentation.

Grrr …

Looking forward to reading other’s ethnographic accounts though.